Emulation of Entanglement Distribution Networks on a Quantum Computer

2026-07-15

AI Summary

This study investigates the effective simulation and performance evaluation of entanglement distribution networks under realistic conditions involving noise and communication delays. By modeling non-ideal Bell-pair sources and classical communication latency on quantum hardware, the work simulates teleportation-based multipartite entanglement generation. Depolarizing noise is implemented via Stinespring dilation, stochastic Pauli errors, and quasiprobability decomposition, while thermal relaxation models capture delay-induced decoherence. Experiments conducted on IQM quantum processors and simulation platforms reveal that, although several noise models are theoretically equivalent, their empirical performance varies significantly due to hardware constraints. These findings underscore the critical role of experimental design in validating quantum network protocols and offer valuable guidance for the practical deployment of future quantum networks.

Abstract

We investigate how quantum computers can be used to emulate quantum networks and study their performance under practical impairments. In particular, we evaluate how degraded entanglement and communication latency affect teleportation-based distributed multipartite-entanglement-state construction. We model imperfect Bell-pair sources using depolarizing noise channels and classical communication delays using thermal relaxation. We implement the depolarization using Stinespring dilation, randomly applied Pauli errors, and quasi-probability decompositions, evaluating the latter two on IQM quantum hardware and all three in simulation. We then study the performance of the entanglement distribution under noise generated by the aforementioned models. Although these noise models are mathematically equivalent, we find that hardware constraints result in profound differences in the corresponding results, highlighting the importance of careful experiment design.

Problem

• entanglement distribution
• quantum networks
• teleportation
• noise modeling
• quantum emulation

Innovation

• entanglement distribution
• quantum network emulation
• depolarizing noise
• quantum hardware implementation
• quasi-probability decomposition