Daiki Ichii | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Experimental zero-added-loss multiplexing Bell-pair source for long-haul quantum networks

Boosting the communication rate of quantum networks is a central challenge in quantum information science. Recently, an efficient entanglement distribution scheme employing quasi-deterministic Bell-pair sources based on time-frequency multiplexing, referred to as zero-added-loss multiplexing~(ZALM), has been proposed. Its implementation, however, requires high-fidelity entanglement swapping across densely multiplexed time-frequency modes, which has remained an experimental challenge. Here we demonstrate entanglement swapping across 16 parallel frequency modes with a high average fidelity of 93.9$\pm$\SI{1.4}{\%}. Notably, polarization-entangled photon pairs in each frequency mode are spectrally single-mode using only off-the-shelf 50-GHz dense wavelength-division multiplexing~(DWDM) filters, eliminating the need for additional narrowband filtering. Furthermore, in order to fully exploit the temporal degree of freedom, the pump pulse is operated with a repetition frequency of \SI{3.0}{GHz}. By combining the frequency and time multiplexing, the total swapping rate reaches 5.38$\pm$0.17\,\si{pairs\,s^{-1}}, which corresponds to the ZALM Bell-pair rate of \SI{8.2e2}{pairs\,s^{-1}}. Our results establish the key experimental capabilities required for ZALM and demonstrate a scalable route toward practical high-rate quantum repeaters and long-haul quantum networks.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Improving the Rate-Loss Scaling in Polarization Entanglement Distribution using Single-Click Entanglement Swapping

Polarization entanglement is widely used in optical quantum information processing due to its compatibility with standard optical components. On the other hand, it is known that polarization entanglement is susceptible to the loss, more precisely, its transmission rate in a lossy channel is limited by the scaling of O({\eta}), where {\eta} is a transmittance of the channel. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that this rate-loss scaling limit can be overcome by a relatively simple protocol. This is possible by integrating the idea of the polarizaion-photon-number hybrid entanglement and the single-click entanglement swapping. We demonstrate square root improvement of the rate-loss scaling from the conventional approaches and achieve the fidelity of 0.843 for the distributed polarization entangled photon pairs. This improvement in the rate-loss scaling is equivalent to that achieved by 1-hop quantum repeater node. Our result paves a way to build a near-future quantum network and its applications.

quant-ph↗