Robust long-distance quantum communication with atomic ensembles and linear optics

Quantum communication deals with absolutely secure transfer of classical messages by means of quantum cryptography or faithful transfer of unknown quantum states by means of quantum teleportation between distant sites. The essential element for quantum communication is to create remote entangled pairs of high fidelity. The main difficulty to create such a distant entangled pair is that both photon loss and decoherence grow exponentially with distance. However, with the help of quantum repeater, it is demonstrated that both the entanglement sources and the time needed to create a single distant entangled pair of high fidelity could scale polynomially with the communication length. Here we propose a robust quantum repeater by extending the original Duan-LukinCirac-Zoller (DLCZ) scheme based on atomic ensembles and linear optics. Our protocol entails the advantage of two photon interference, which is more robust than single photon interference used in the DLCZ scheme. In comparison with our previous proposal, the entangled memory qubits are manipulated across long distance, and local entanglement pairs are avoided. Our proposal provides an exciting possibility for realistic long distance quantum communication. Quantum repeater is a crucial element for long distance quantum communication. In a seminal paper Duan et al. proposed a promising implementation of quantum repeater with the help of atomic ensembles and linear optics. It is shown that the atomic ensembles,