One-shot entanglement generation over long distances in noisy quantum networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of creating a long-distance entangled state between two stations of a network, where neighboring nodes are connected by noisy quantum channels. We show that any two stations can share an entangled pair if the effective probability for the quantum errors is below a certain threshold, which is achieved by a local encoding of the qubits and a global bit-flip correction. In contrast to the conventional quantum-repeater schemes, we do not need to store the qubits in quantum memory for a long time: our protocol is a one-shot process (i.e., the elementary entangled pairs are used only once) involving one-way classical communication. Furthermore, the overhead of local resources increases only logarithmically with the size of the network, making our proposal favorable to long-distance quantum communication. © 2008 The American Physical Society.