Tools for the design of quantum repeater networks

Abstract

Communication between remote quantum computers enables tasks that are unachievable with their conventional counterparts, such as unconditionally-secure communication or quantum computing in the cloud. Bridging long distances, where the communication fundamentally suffers from loss, can be achieved by splitting up the distance into segments and positioning so-called quantum repeaters in between. In this thesis, we develop tools to analyse how a large class of quantum repeater schemes will perform when implemented on real hardware suffering from time-dependent noise, in particular imperfect quantum memories for storing quantum information.