Finite-energy GKP-QPC architectures for photonic quantum memories and repeaters

Abstract

Photonic quantum networks require error-correction architectures that remain useful with finite-energy bosonic states, pure-loss fiber transmission, and explicit resource accounting. In this light, we study a concatenated architecture in which each physical rail is a finitely squeezed Gottesman--Kitaev--Preskill (GKP) qubit transmitted through a pure-loss fiber segment, corrected by teleportation-based GKP error correction with finitely squeezed ancillae, and decoded by an outer quantum parity code (QPC). The GKP layer converts continuous homodyne syndromes into effective rail-level Pauli marginals, while the QPC layer suppresses the residual qubit-level errors. For the concatenated code family considered here, we find a finite-squeezing threshold of $5.06\,\mathrm{dB}$ at zero propagation loss. In the memory setting, the QPC layer lowers the squeezing at which repeated error correction becomes beneficial from $6.7\,\mathrm{dB}$ for bare GKP correction to $5.2\,\mathrm{dB}$ for QPC$(3,3)$ and $4.3\,\mathrm{dB}$ for QPC$(5,5)$, and improves the average-fidelity ratio by up to $75$--$90\%$ in the relevant intermediate-noise regime. In the repeater setting, avoiding pre-amplification gives larger secret-key fractions at moderate squeezing, but also produces an optimal squeezing because highly squeezed GKP peaks become sensitive to loss-induced inward displacement. Resource-normalized rates show that QPC concatenation can exceed the repeaterless PLOB benchmark by orders of magnitude and extend the communication reach, at short repeater spacing, to distances of order $10^4$km with $14$dB squeezing. However, QPC concatenation becomes detrimental when each elementary hop is too lossy. These results provide quantitative design rules for finite-squeezing GKP--QPC quantum memories and repeaters.