Resource-efficient quantum communication using all-photonic graph states generated from quantum emitters

The emergence of quantum communication technologies shows great promise for applications ranging from the secure transmission of secret messages to distributed quantum computing. Due to fiber losses, long-distance quantum communication requires the use of quantum repeaters, for which there exist quantum memory-based schemes and all photonic schemes. While all-photonic approaches based on graph states generated from linear optics avoid coherence time issues associated with memories, they outperform repeaterless protocols only at the expense of a significant overhead in resources. Here, we consider using quantum emitters to produce the graph states and show how the resource/performance trade-off can be optimized to yield a protocol that outperforms both repeaterless and memory-based schemes. Our results should pave the way towards the practical implementation of both resource-efficient and fast long-distance quantum communication.