Resource reduction via repeaters in entanglement distribution

Abstract

We show that the amount of entanglement needed as an initial resource to set up a certain final amount of entanglement between two ends of a noisy channel can be reduced in certain cases by using quantum repeaters. Our investigation (for various channels) considers cases when a large number of entangled pairs are transmitted through the channel using known asymptotic results and conjectured bounds on distillable entanglement.