Quantum Repeaters based on Deterministic Storage of a Single Photon in distant Atomic Ensembles

Abstract: Quantum repeaters hold the promise to prevent the photon losses in communication channels. Most recently, the serious efforts have been applied to achieve scalable distribution of entanglement over long distances. However, the probabilistic nature of entanglement generation and realistic quantum memory storage times make the implementation of quantum repeaters an outstanding experimental challenge. We propose a quantum repeater protocol based on the deterministic storage of a single photon in atomic ensembles confined in distant high-finesse cavities and show that this system is capable of distributing the entanglement over long distances with a much higher rate as compared to previous protocols, thereby alleviating the limitations on the quantum memory lifetime by several orders of magnitude. Our scheme is robust with respect to phase fluctuations in the quantum channel, while the fidelity imperfection is fixed and negligibly small at each step of entanglement swapping.