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Quantum networking with advances in fiber technology

Prateek Mantri1,*, Michael S. Bullock1,2, Aditya Tripathi2, Robert Kwolek2, Rajveer Nehra1,2,3, and Don Towsley1

  • *Contact author: pmantri@cs.umass.edu
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Phys. Rev. A 114, 042603 – Published 2 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/lf9y-3h7h

Abstract

Recent comparisons of quantum repeater protocols have highlighted the strong near-term potential of multiplexed two-way architectures for long-distance quantum communication. At the same time, advances in hollow-core fiber (HCF) technology motivate a reexamination of the physical transmission medium as an architectural lever in quantum network design. In this work we compare emerging antiresonant HCFs against conventional silica single-mode fibers (SMFs) in multiplexed two-way quantum repeater networks. We evaluate their performance under both telecom and memory-native transmission, accounting for frequency-conversion overheads, coupling efficiencies, memory decoherence, and operational noise. We find that HCF significantly outperforms SMF across a wide range of regimes. With memory-native transmission, HCF yields up to an order of magnitude improvement in secret-key rate per channel use under realistic conversion efficiencies. Even at telecom wavelengths, HCF enables larger optimal repeater spacing, improving rate-cost tradeoffs and reducing repeater requirements. We further quantify the role of memory quality, hardware efficiency, detector and conversion losses, and two-qubit gate noise in shaping these gains. These results show that recent advances in HCF materially expand the design space of practical terrestrial quantum repeater networks.

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Phys. Rev. A 114, 042603– Published 2 October, 2026
  • Received 24 April 2026
  • Revised 10 August 2026
  • Accepted 2 September 2026
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