Experimental demonstration of memory-enhanced scaling for entanglement connection of quantum repeater segments

The quantum repeater protocol is a promising approach for implementing long-distance communication and large-scale networks. A key idea of the to use long-lived memories achieve an efficient entanglement connection between different segments, with polynomial scaling. Here, we report experiment that realizes two segments via on-demand swapping through atomic storage times tens milliseconds. With memory enhancement, acceleration in scaling demonstrated rate successful connection. Experimental realization memory-enhanced demonstrates advantage protocol, creating cornerstone development future Two are connected by using memories. efficiency improves from quadratic linear one preparation atom–photon entanglement.