TY - JOUR T1 - Quantum repeaters based on two species trapped ions JF - New J. Phys. Y1 - 2019 A1 - Siddhartha Santra A1 - Sreraman Muralidharan A1 - Martin Lichtman A1 - Liang Jiang A1 - Christopher Monroe A1 - Vladimir S. Malinovsky AB -

We examine the viability of quantum repeaters based on two-species trapped ion modules for long distance quantum key distribution. Repeater nodes comprised of ion-trap modules of co-trapped ions of distinct species are considered. The species used for communication qubits has excellent optical properties while the other longer lived species serves as a memory qubit in the modules. Each module interacts with the network only via single photons emitted by the communication ions. Coherent Coulomb interaction between ions is utilized to transfer quantum information between the communication and memory ions and to achieve entanglement swapping between two memory ions. We describe simple modular quantum repeater architectures realizable with the ion-trap modules and numerically study the dependence of the quantum key distribution rate on various experimental parameters, including coupling efficiency, gate infidelity, operation time and length of the elementary links. Our analysis suggests crucial improvements necessary in a physical implementation for co-trapped two-species ions to be a competitive platform in long-distance quantum communication. 

VL - 21 UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.10723 CP - 073002 U5 - https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ab2a45 ER -