Long-distance quantum communication with atomic ensembles and linear optics

By Luming Duan, Mikhail D. Lukin, I. Cirac, Peter Zoller. Nature, 2001

3,143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum communication holds promise for absolutely secure transmission of secret messages and the faithful transfer of unknown quantum states. Photonic channels appear to be very attractive for the physical implementation of quantum communication. However, owing to losses and decoherence in the channel, the communication fidelity decreases exponentially with the channel length. Here we describe a scheme that allows the implementation of robust quantum communication over long lossy channels. The scheme involves laser manipulation of atomic ensembles, beam splitters, and single-photon detectors with moderate efficiencies, and is therefore compatible with current experimental technology. We show that the communication efficiency scales polynomially with the channel length, and hence the scheme should be operable over very long distances.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a435c4730520628f0fe48e289782925a4979c251

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Citations in the corpus

Coherent population trapping of an electron spin in a single negatively charged quantum dot (2008, background): “electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) [7, 8], slow light [9], quantum information storage [10] and quantum repeaters [11, 12].”
Nanoantennas for visible and infrared radiation (2011, background): “Therefore, in the optical regime, quantum aspects of the interaction of radiation and matter can be exploited in the context of long distance communication [26].”
Quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles and linear optics (2009, background): “…excitations that are of great interest for practical applications is that they can be read out very efficiently by converting them into single photons that propagate in a well-defined direction, thanks to collective interference (Duan et al., 2001; Laurat et al., 2006; Simon et al., 2007c).”
Electromagnetically induced transparency : Optics in coherent media (2005, background): “The intermediate storage and subsequent retrieval of correlated photons in atomic ensembles are essential ingredients of the proposal of Duan and co-workers for a quantum repeater Duan et al., 2001 , which is an important tool for long-distance quantum communication.”
Colloquium: Quantum networks with trapped ions (2010, methodology): “Following the socalled Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller ͑DLCZ͒ scheme ͑Duan et al., 2001͒, atomic ensembles are widely considered as quantum nodes for quantum communication and quantum repeater networks.”
The security of practical quantum key distribution (2008, background): “Actually, variations of this basic scheme may be more practical (Duan et al., 2001).”
Twin-field quantum key distribution over 830-km fibre (2019, background): “The event-ready detection technologies of quantum repeater have been proposed with single-photon BSM [15], twophoton BSM [16], and entangled coherent state (ECS) measurement [17].”
Storage and retrieval of single photons transmitted between remote quantum memories (2005, methodology): “2 The potential of atomic ensembles to serve as quantum memories has recently attracted considerable attention [1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11], spawning two distinct lines of research.”
Quantum computing with neutral atoms (2020, background): “Several socalled quantum repeater protocols [85, 86] based on atomic ensemble memories have been proposed to overcome this challenge, and experiments are progressing rapidly [87, 88].”
Entangling independent photons by time measurement (2007, background): “If count rates are also further improved, long-distance quantum communicatio”