Restoring Quantum Communication Efficiency over High Loss Optical Fibers

In the absence of quantum repeaters, quantum communication proved to be nearly impossible across optical fibres longer than $\gtrsim 20\text{ km}$ due to the drop of transmissivity below the critical threshold of $1/2$. However, if the signals fed into the fibre are separated by a sufficiently short time interval, memory effects must be taken into account. In this paper we show that by properly accounting for these effects it is possible to devise schemes that enable unassisted quantum communication across arbitrarily long optical fibres at a fixed positive qubit transmission rate. We also demonstrate how to achieve entanglement-assisted communication over arbitrarily long distances at a rate of the same order of the maximum achievable in the unassisted noiseless case.
Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures. The full technical details, proofs and additional developments are deferred to the companion paper [F. A. Mele, L. Lami, and V. Giovannetti. Quantum optical communication in the presence of strong attenuation noise. Preprint arXiv:2204.13129, 2022]. In v3 minor typos have been fixed