Quantum repeaters with linear-optical pairwise fusion gates

Quantum repeaters are necessary building blocks to realize not only long-distance quantum communication but also the quantum internet. Although quantum repeater protocols are composed of entanglement generation (between adjacent nodes) and entanglement swapping, the performance strongly depends on the success probability of the entanglement swapping. In this talk, we introduce a linear-optical “pairwise” fusion gate that probabilistically projects a pair of qudits onto a Bell state in a two-qubit subspace. The success probability of this gate increases with the dimension of the qudits. We show that the scaling of quantum repeater protocols can be improved dramatically if we use our fusion gates for the entanglement swapping, instead of conventional ones.