Multi-copy nested entanglement purification for quantum repeaters

The distribution of maximal entanglement stands as a pivotal technique in long-distance practical quantum communication. Specifically, achieving high-fidelity entanglement distribution leans upon efficacious entanglement purification and entanglement concentration. In this paper, we materialize error-rejecting nonlocal entanglement purification protocol (EPP) and entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for solid-state emitter systems assisted by the scattering property of photon-emitter in one-dimensional waveguide. The parity-check gates of both the EPP and ECP can herald the faulty events with the help of the detectors that click, so they are accomplished, in principle, with unity fidelities, which are conducive to implement two protocols. Moreover, additional emitters are unnecessary except a single photon.

We report on the generation of a bright photon source at telecom wavelengths using spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a type II periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate crystal. Simultaneous resonances of the pump and the two down-converted fields are achieved with a properly designed optical cavity. This triple-resonance optical parametric oscillator operates far below threshold, generating photon pairs at 1560 nm wavelength with a bandwidth of 8 MHz. Time correlation measurements produce an estimate of 27.7 ns for the coherence time, and production rate of 134±25  s−1 MHz−1 mW−1 for photon pairs. As photon pairs in the telecom regime are suitable for long-distance transmission, this source may find application in quantum communications.

A scheme is proposed to implement entanglement purification for two remote less entangled photons using robust continuous variable coherent modes, called as quantum communication bus (qubus), rather than consuming expensive ancilla single-photon sources. The qubus beams in the coherent states provide for the natural communication in the purification protocol, instead of the classical communication between the distant photons. Weak cross-Kerr nonlinearities, qubus beams and quantum non-demolition (QND) photon-number-resolving measurement are utilized for implementing deterministic entanglement purification. The core element to realize the QND measurement is Kerr nonlinearity. The necessary QND measurement in the present scheme is not an extra, very difficult, addition to the present protocol, but is taken care of by a phase measurement. The entanglement purification protocol (EPP) can obtain a maximally entangled pair with only one step, instead of improving the fidelity of less entangled pairs by performing continuous indefinite iterative purification procedure. The total success probability and fidelity of the present purification scheme can approach unit in principle. In addition, we investigate photon loss of the qubus beams during the transmission and decoherence effects in the entanglement purification caused by such a photon loss.

Based on quasi-phase-matching (QPM) theory, nonlinear photonic crystals (NPCs) are capable of realizing efficient spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) for the generation of photonic entangled states. However, the traditional electric field poling techniques employed in NPC fabrication often result in non-negligible processing errors of a few hundred nanometers, thus impeding the production of quantum photon pairs as intended. In this work, we investigate the SPDC photon pairs generated in a laser-poled lithium niobate (LN) NPC. By using the recently developed laser poling technique, the processing error of the NPC is substantially reduced to approximately 15 nm. Consequently, the coincidence counts of the generated photon pairs in the experiment reach 83.6% of the designed value. Our result paves the way for on-demand production of high-quality quantum sources, which has potential applications in quantum communications and quantum computations.

Logic qubit plays an important role in quantum computation. Recent research showed that logic qubit entanglement can be used in long-distance quantum communication. In this paper, we describe an entanglement purification protocol (EPP) for one type of logic qubit entanglement, named concatenated Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger(C-GHZ) state. Not only the logic bit-flip and phase-flip errors in the C-GHZ state but also the single physical qubit bit-flip and phase-flip errors in the logic qubit can be purified. This EPP does not require the sophisticated controlled-not gate, but only requires some feasible linear optical elements, which is feasible in the current experimental condition.

Entangled photon sources play a pivotal role in most of the optical systems that utilize quantum effects. Those include quantum key distribution, quantum computing, metrology, sensing and imaging. Photon pair generation using spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) is one of the most popular routes for producing entangled photons. While SPDC has become more popular, the creation of entangled photon pairs in a degree of freedom, such as polarization, is more challenging. The difficulty is related in no small part to the birefringence of the structure where the generation takes place. Birefringence results in distinguishing information that hinders the production of entanglement in the platforms where SPDC has been most popular including ferroelectric crystals.Despite this limitation, entangled sources have been realized in bulk crystals via well designed interference techniques, which often include additional compensating optics. As the boundaries of optical quantum information science continue to be extended, multi-photon entanglement is now required. Solutions based on SPDC have been attempted, and while some outstanding results have been achieved, the interferometers and compensation procedures become increasingly complex as the size of the entangled state grows. Such scalability and stability issues are directly addressed by integrated entangled photon sources, and while still in their infancy, they promise to help a great deal towards the practical utilization and the production of entanglement on a larger scale.Semiconductors are an ideal platform to fabricate such integrated entangled photon sources. Recently, it was demonstrated that the gallium-arsenide (GaAs) based Bragg refection waveguide (BRW), could efficiently produce photon pairs via SPDC. This platfrom was shown to have a distinct advantage over other semiconductor sources, due largely to its monolithic architecture and its layered epitaxy, which underpins many photonic devices. In this work we demonstrate yet another advantage: the intrinsic capability of the BRW to directly produce polarization entangled photon pairs, without any additional interferometry, spectral filtering, compensation or post-selection. Not only do we show that the BRW can produce entangled photons, but we wish to emphasize that the traditional compensation and interferometric methods used to create entanglement, which presumably would have occurred on chip, may no longer be necessary. Our experimental results confirm that the BRW has the potential to be one of the very first self-contained integrated room temperature resources of entanglement.In this talk various approaches for utilizing SPDC processes in various integration platforms will be discussed. The root cause of entanglement generation is the lack of birefringence in these material systems, which otherwise makes exact phase matching impossible in bulk crystals. Because of this, cross-polarized photons propagate at almost identical group velocities, making off-chip path compensation unnecessary.

Non-phase-matched spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in atomically thin materials provides new degrees of freedom and enhanced quantum information capacity compared to conventional phase-matched sources. These systems emerged as promising platforms for quantum computing, communication, and imaging, with the potential to support higher-order nonlinear processes. However, direct observation of photon-pair emission from a monolayer has remained experimentally challenging. In this work, we theoretically modeled SPDC emission across the full angular space from a monolayer GaSe film and experimentally validated the model through measurements of both co- and counter-propagating photon pairs. We demonstrated two-photon quantum correlations in the telecom C-band from a monolayer SPDC source. The spatially symmetric, broadband emission predicted by theory was confirmed experimentally. Furthermore, we observed high-fidelity Bell states in the counter-propagating configuration. Our results revealed the emission characteristics of SPDC in the deeply subwavelength, non-phase-matched regime, and introduced atomically thin, counter-propagating SPDC as a scalable and integrable platform for programmable quantum state generation, extendable via moiré superlattice engineering.

Shor and Preskill (see Phys. Rev. Lett., vol.85, p.441, 2000) have provided a simple proof of security of the standard quantum key distribution scheme by Bennett and Brassard (1984) by demonstrating a connection between key distribution and entanglement purification protocols (EPPs) with one-way communications. Here, we provide proofs of security of standard quantum key distribution schemes, Bennett and Brassard and the six-state scheme, against the most general attack, by using the techniques of two-way entanglement purification. We demonstrate clearly the advantage of classical post-processing with two-way classical communications over classical post-processing with only one-way classical communications in quantum key distribution (QKD). This is done by the explicit construction of a new protocol for (the error correction/detection and privacy amplification of) Bennett and Brassard that can tolerate a bit error rate of up to 18.9%, which is higher than what any Bennett and Brassard scheme with only one-way classical communications can possibly tolerate. Moreover, we demonstrate the advantage of the six-state scheme over Bennett and Brassard by showing that the six-state scheme can strictly tolerate a higher bit error rate than Bennett and Brassard. In particular, our six-state protocol can tolerate a bit error rate of 26.4%, which is higher than the upper bound of 25% bit error rate for any secure Bennett and Brassard protocol. Consequently, our protocols may allow higher key generation rate and remain secure over longer distances than previous protocols. Our investigation suggests that two-way entanglement purification is a useful tool in the study of advantage distillation, error correction, and privacy amplification protocols.

Fast characterization of pulsed spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) sources is important for applications in quantum information processing and communications. We propose a simple method to perform this task, which only requires measuring the counts on the two output channels and the coincidences between them, as well as modeling the filter used to reduce the source bandwidth. The proposed method is experimentally tested and used for a complete evaluation of SPDC sources (pair emission probability, total losses, and fidelity) of various bandwidths. This method can find applications in the setting up of SPDC sources and in the continuous verification of the quality of quantum communication links.

We propose an entanglement purification protocol (EPP) for ideal entangled photon sources resorting to weak cross-Kerr nonlinearities. The key element of this EPP is the quantum nondemolition detector (QND) which uses weak cross-Kerr nonlinearity effect to generate phase shifts on the coherent states conditionally. By exploiting the double cross-phase modulation (XPM) method in QND, we present an efficient EPP protocol, which reduces the requirement for coupling strength of the cross-Kerr nonlinearity medium. The proposed protocol may open up promising possibilities for the practicability of quantum information processing using weak cross-Kerr nonlinearities.

Hyperentanglement has attracted much attention due to its fascinating applications in quantum communication. However, it is impossible to purify a pair of photon systems in a mixed hyperentangled state with errors in two degrees of freedom using linear optical elements only, far different from all the existing entanglement purification protocols in a degree of freedom (DOF) for quantum systems. Here, we investigate the possibility of purifying a spatial-polarization mixed hyperentangled Bell state with the errors in both the spatial-mode and polarization DOFs, resorting to the nonlinear optics of a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in a diamond embedded in a photonic crystal cavity coupled to a waveguide. We present the first hyperentanglement purification protocol for purifying a pair of two-photon systems in a mixed hyperentangled Bell state with the errors in two DOFs. We also propose an efficient hyperentanglement concentration protocol for a partially hyperentangled Bell pure state, which has the maximal success probability in principle. These two protocols are useful in long-distance quantum communication with hyperentanglement.

Quantum-photonic chips, which integrate quantum light sources alongside active and passive optical elements, as well as single-photon detectors, show great potential for photonic quantum information processing and quantum technology. Mature semiconductor nanofabrication processes allow for scaling such photonic integrated circuits to on-chip networks of increasing complexity. Second-order nonlinear materials are the method of choice for generating photonic quantum states in the overwhelming majority of linear optic experiments using bulk components, but integration with waveguide circuitry on a nanophotonic chip proved to be challenging. Here, we demonstrate such an on-chip parametric down-conversion source of photon pairs based on second-order nonlinearity in an aluminum-nitride microring resonator. We show the potential of our source for quantum information processing by measuring the high visibility anti-bunching of heralded single photons with nearly ideal state purity. Our down-conversion source yields measured coincidence rates of 80 Hz, which implies MHz generation rates of correlated photon pairs. Low noise performance is demonstrated by measuring high coincidence-to-accidental ratios. The generated photon pairs are spectrally far separated from the pump field, providing great potential for realizing sufficient on-chip filtering and monolithic integration of quantum light sources, waveguide circuits and single-photon detectors.

We investigate measurement-based entanglement purification protocols (EPP) in the presence of local noise and imperfections. We derive a universal, protocol-independent threshold for the required quality of the local resource states, where we show that local noise per particle of up to 24% is tolerable. This corresponds to an increase of the noise threshold by almost an order of magnitude, based on the joint measurement-based implementation of sequential rounds of few-particle EPP. We generalize our results to multipartite EPP, where we encounter similarly high error thresholds.

Entangled photon pairs are a crucial resource in quantum information processing. However, common sources of entangled photon pairs, such as generation by spontaneous parametric down-conversion, impose a Poisson distribution on the pairs, limiting their applicability to quantum information processing. Therefore, generating entangled photon pairs exhibiting a sub-Poisson distribution (i.e., entangled photon bundle) would be crucial/an important advancement in the current research context. Recently, it has been proposed that antibunched photon pairs can be generated using pulsed excitation of quantum dots based on photon blockade. In this work we propose a scheme to generate entangled photon pairs with strong antibunching properties via continuous driving. Under two-photon resonant continuous pumping, a quantum dot is first excited to a biexciton state and then emits a pair of entangled photons into a two-mode cavity. Owing to the strong coupling between the quantum dot and optical modes of the cavity, at most one pair of left-/right-polarized photons exists at a time in the cavity. Specifically, the antibunching effect, average photon number, and entanglement of the left- or right-polarized photons can be resonantly enhanced when the coupling strengths between the exciton (biexciton) transition and cavity modes are equal. Moreover, our results show that the binding energy of the biexciton substantially affects the antibunching effect, average photon number, and entanglement of the left-/right-polarized photons. With suitable parameters, we can realize photon pairs with strong antibunching, a large average photon number, and deep entanglement. Hence, the studied quantum dot-cavity system is a promising source of antibunched entangled photon pairs.

Environmental noise is a big obstacle in quantum communication and computation. Quantum error code (QEC) technology can resist the photon transmission loss and decoherence error caused by the environmental noise and has great application potential in future quantum communication and computation fields. The generation of logic qubits or logic entanglement is the important first step of the QEC. The logic W state, which replaces each physical qubit in a physical W state with a logic qubit, may be highly robust against photon loss and errors, so that it may have big application potential. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme to generate an arbitrary logic W state with the help of cross-Kerr nonlinearities. Our protocol only requires a physical W state and some auxiliary single photons, and can deterministically generate a general logic W state based on the homodyne measurement results. Our logic W state generation protocol may be useful in future quantum information processing based on the logic W state.