Experimental time-reversed adaptive Bell measurement towards all-photonic quantum repeaters

Abstract

© 2019, The Author(s). An all-optical network is identified as a promising infrastructure for fast and energy-efficient communication. Recently, it has been shown that its quantum version based on ‘all-photonic quantum repeaters’—inheriting, at least, the same advantages—expands its possibility to the quantum realm, that is, a global quantum internet with applications far beyond the conventional Internet. Here we report a proof-of-principle experiment for a key component for the all-photonic repeaters—called all-photonic time-reversed adaptive (TRA) Bell measurement, with a proposal for the implementation. In particular, our TRA measurement—based only on optical devices without any quantum memories and any quantum error correction—passively but selectively performs the Bell measurement only on single photons that have successfully survived their lossy travel over optical channels. In fact, our experiment shows that only the survived single-photon state is faithfully teleported without the disturbance from the other lost photons, as the theory predicts.