Robust entanglement distribution via quantum network coding

Abstract

Many protocols of quantum information processing, like quantum key distribution or measurementbased quantum computation, consume entangled quantum states during their execution. When participants are located at distant sites, these resource states need to be distributed. Due to transmission losses quantum repeater become necessary for large distances (e.g. ≳300 km). Here we generalize the concept of the graph state repeater toD-dimensional graph states and to repeaters that can perform basic measurement-based quantum computations, which we call quantum routers. This processing of data at intermediate network nodes is called quantum network coding.Wedescribe how a scheme to distribute general two-colourable graph states via quantum routers with network coding can be constructed from classical linear network codes. The robustness of the distribution of graph states against outages of network nodes is analysed by establishing a link to stabilizer error correction codes. Furthermore we show, that for any stabilizer error correction code there exists a corresponding quantum network code with similar error correcting capabilities.