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We present an entanglement swapping process for unknown nonmaximally entangled photonic states, where the standard Bell-state measurement is replaced by a three-step quantum walk-like state discrimination process, i.e., the practically nontrivial coupling element of two photons is replaced by manipulating their trajectories, which will greatly enrich the dynamics of the coupling between photons in realizing quantum computation, and reduce the integration complexity of optical quantum processing. In addition, the output state can be maximally entangled, which allows for entanglement concentration as well.
We formulate the problem of finding the optimal entanglement swapping scheme in a quantum repeater chain as a Markov decision process and present its solution for different repeaters sizes. Based on this, we are able to demonstrate that the commonly used doubling scheme for performing probabilistic entanglement swapping of probabilistically distributed entangled qubit pairs in quantum repeaters does not always produce the best possible raw rate. Focussing on this figure of merit, without considering additional probabilistic elements for error suppression such as entanglement distillation on higher nesting levels, our approach reveals that a power-of-two number of segments has no privileged position in quantum repeater theory; the best scheme can be constructed for any number of segments. Moreover, classical communication can be included into our scheme, and we show how this influences the raw waiting time for different number of segments, confirming again the optimality of non-doubling in some relevant parameter regimes. Thus, our approach provides the minimal possible waiting time of quantum repeaters in a fairly general physical setting.
Two qubits in pure entangled states going through separate paths and interacting with their own individual environments will gradually lose their entanglement. Here we show that the entanglement change of a two-qubit state due to amplitude damping noises can be recovered by entanglement swapping. Some initial states can be asymptotically purified into maximally entangled states by iteratively using our protocol.
We propose a scheme to realize entanglement swapping via superradiance, entangling two distant cavities without a direct interaction. The successful Bell-state-measurement outcomes are performed naturally by the electromagnetic reservoir, and we show how, using a quantum trajectory method, the non-local properties of the state obtained after the swapping procedure can be verified by the steering inequality. Furthermore, we discuss how the unsuccessful measurement outcomes can be used in an experiment of delayed-choice entanglement swapping. An extension of testing the quantum steering inequality with the observers at three different times is also considered
We report on an experiment demonstrating entanglement swapping of time-frequency entangled photons. We perform a frequency-resolved Bell-state measurement on the idler photons from two independent entangled photon pairs, which projects the signal photons onto a two-color Bell state. We verify entanglement in this heralded state using two-photon interference and observing quantum beating without the use of filters, indicating the presence of two-color entanglement. Our method could lend itself to use as a highly-tunable source of frequency-bin entangled single photons.
We report entanglement swapping with time-bin entangled photon pairs, each constituted of a 795 nm photon and a 1533 nm photon, that are created via spontaneous parametric down conversion in a non-linear crystal. After projecting the two 1533 nm photons onto a Bell state, entanglement between the two 795 nm photons is verified by means of quantum state tomography. As an important feature, the wavelength and bandwidth of the 795 nm photons is compatible with Tm:LiNbO3-based quantum memories, making our experiment an important step towards the realization of a quantum repeater.