Entanglement distribution in optical fibers assisted by nonlocal memory effects

Abstract

The successful implementation of several quantum information and communication protocols requires distributing entangled pairs of quantum bits in a reliable manner. While there exists a substantial amount of recent theoretical and experimental activities dealing with non-Markovian quantum dynamics, experimental application and verification of the usefulness of memory effects for quantum information tasks are still missing. We combine these two aspects and show experimentally that a recently introduced concept of nonlocal memory effects allows to protect and distribute polarization entangled pairs of photons in an efficient manner within polarization-maintaining (PM) optical fibers. The introduced scheme is based on correlating the environments, i.e. frequencies of the polarization entangled photons, before their physical distribution. When comparing to the case without nonlocal memory effects, we demonstrate at least a 12-fold improvement in the channel, or fiber length, for preserving the highly entangled initial polarization states of photons against dephasing.