Gate-Based Microwave Quantum Repeater Via Grid-State Encoding

In autonomous quantum error correction the lifetime of a logical bosonic qubit can be extended beyond its physical constituents without feedback measurements. Leveraging autonomous error correction, we propose a second-generation gate-based microwave quantum repeater (GBMQR) with encoded bosonic grid states. Each repeater station comprises a transmon and two bosonic resonators: one resonator serving as a stationary quantum memory utilizing autonomous error correction, and the other as an information bus for entanglement generation. Entanglement is generated sequentially through the successful absorption of a microwave photon wavepacket. This method enables deterministic entanglement generation, in contrast to a probabilistic mixing of two heralding signals on a balanced beamsplitter. Furthermore, our GBMQR employs an all-bosonic entanglement swapping Bell-state measurement. This is implemented via a bosonic controlled-Z gate and two separate X-basis projective homodyne measurements on the stationary stored codewords. Our approach circumvents mode-mismatch losses associated with routing and interfering of heralding modes on a beamsplitter, and confines losses to those arising from stationary storage. We evaluate the performance of the proposed quantum repeater by calculating its secret key rate under realistic lab environments. Moreover, we explicitly demonstrate that at stationary damping rate of $\kappa^{-1}_{\text{damp}}=$~\SI{40}{\milli\second}, GBMQR can achieve entanglement generation and swapping success probabilities approx.~$0.75$, and $0.58$ respectively, surpassing the hallmark success probability of $1/2$ set by ideal linear beamsplitter-based Bell-state measurements. The proposed device can be implemented using currently available superconducting microwave technology and is suited for secure chip-to-chip communication and distributed quantum computing.