How far can one send a photon?

Abstract

The answer to the question How far can one send a photon? depends heavily on what one means by a photon and on what one intends to do with that photon. For direct quantum communication, the limit is approximately 500 km. For terrestrial quantum communication, near-future technologies based on quantum teleportation and quantum memories will soon enable quantum repeaters that will turn the development of a world-wide-quantum-web (WWQW) into a highly non-trivial engineering problem. For Device-Independent Quantum Information Processing, near-future qubit amplifiers (i.e., probabilistic heralded amplification of the probability amplitude of the presence of photonic qubits) will soon allow demonstrations over a few tens of kilometers.

Keywords

quantum communication

References

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg