We discuss a long-distance quantum communication system based on entangled photon pairs, which apply entanglement as its fundamental resource. For distances longer than the coherence length of a counterpart noisy quantum channel, the fidelity of transmission is ordinarily so low that standard purification processes are not applicable. The quantum repeater stretches the length of the entangled photon pairs. And the high fidelity entanglement of photons between sender and receiver is obtained by entanglement purification and entanglement swapping. We compare the nested repeater with the common repeater and show that it outperforms the latter, which is built an EPR pair in less time.
Nonclassical photon pairs from a cold atomic ensemble for scalable quantum communication
