Entanglement swapping with independent sources over an optical-fiber network

Abstract

Establishing entanglement between two remote systems by the method of entanglement swapping is an essential step for a long-distance quantum network. Here we report a field-test entanglement swapping experiment with two independent telecommunication band entangled photon-pair sources over an optical fiber network in Hefei. The two sources are located at two nodes that are 12.5km apart and the Bell-state measurement is performed at a third location which is connected to the two source nodes with 14.7-km and 10.6-km optical fibers, respectively. The observed average visibility is 79.9±4.8%, which is sufficient for the violation of Bell inequalities. Furthermore, with the swapped entanglement, we demonstrate a source-independent quantum key distribution, which is also immune to any detection attacks at the measurement site.