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.
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There are quantum memories with longer storage times; however, they do not allow incoming photons to be s-tored. They either generate photons that are entangled with the quantum memory (hence, there are no read-write quantum memories, but read-only memories [10]), or they do not have any input-output [11].
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Gisin, N. How far can one send a photon?. Front. Phys. 10, 100307 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-015-0485-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-015-0485-x