Improving the Rate-Loss Scaling in Polarization Entanglement Distribution using Single-Click Entanglement Swapping

Abstract

Polarization entanglement is widely used in optical quantum information processing due to its compatibility with standard optical components. On the other hand, it is known that polarization entanglement is susceptible to the loss, more precisely, its transmission rate in a lossy channel is limited by the scaling of O({\eta}), where {\eta} is a transmittance of the channel. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that this rate-loss scaling limit can be overcome by a relatively simple protocol. This is possible by integrating the idea of the polarizaion-photon-number hybrid entanglement and the single-click entanglement swapping. We demonstrate square root improvement of the rate-loss scaling from the conventional approaches and achieve the fidelity of 0.843 for the distributed polarization entangled photon pairs. This improvement in the rate-loss scaling is equivalent to that achieved by 1-hop quantum repeater node. Our result paves a way to build a near-future quantum network and its applications.