Deterministic generation of all-photonic quantum repeaters from solid-state emitters

Donovan Buterakos, Edwin Barnes, Sophia E. Economou

Published 2016-12-12Version 1

Quantum repeaters are nodes in a quantum communication network that allow reliable transmission of entanglement over large distances. It was recently shown that highly entangled photons in so-called graph states can be used for all-photonic quantum repeaters, which require substantially fewer resources compared to atomic-memory based repeaters. However, standard approaches to building multi-photon entangled states through pairwise probabilistic entanglement generation severely limit the size of the state that can be created. Here, we present a protocol for the deterministic generation of large photonic repeater states using quantum emitters such as semiconductor quantum dots and defect centers in solids. We show that arbitrarily large repeater states can be generated using only two coupled emitters, reducing the necessary number of photon sources by six orders of magnitude. Our protocol includes a built-in redundancy which makes it resilient to photon loss.