Experimental quantum repeater without quantum memory

Quantum repeaters—important components of a scalable quantum internet—enable entanglement to be distributed over long distances. The standard paradigm for a quantum repeater relies on the necessary, demanding requirement of quantum memory. Despite significant progress, the limited performance of quantum memory means that making practical quantum repeaters remains a challenge. Remarkably, a proposed all-photonic quantum repeater avoids the need for quantum memory by harnessing the graph states in the repeater nodes. Here we perform an experimental demonstration of an all-photonic quantum repeater. By manipulating a 12-photon interferometer, we implement a 2 × 2 parallel all-photonic quantum repeater, and observe an 89% enhancement of entanglement-generation rate over standard parallel entanglement swapping. These results provide a new approach to designing repeaters with efficient single-photon sources and photonic graph states, and suggest that the all-photonic scheme represents an alternative path—parallel to matter-memory-based schemes—towards realizing practical quantum repeaters. An all-photonic quantum repeater is demonstrated by manipulating state-of-the-art 12-photon interferometry. The enhancement of entanglement-generation rate compared with parallel entanglement swapping proves the feasibility of the concept.