Interoperability in encoded quantum repeater networks

The future of quantum repeater networking will require interoperability between various error-correcting codes. A few specific code conversions and even a generalized method are known, however, no detailed analysis of these techniques in the context of quantum networking has been performed. In this paper we analyze a generalized procedure to create Bell pairs encoded heterogeneously between two separate codes used often in error-corrected quantum repeater network designs. We begin with a physical Bell pair and then encode each qubit in a different error-correcting code, using entanglement purification to increase the fidelity. We investigate three separate protocols for preparing the purified encoded Bell pair. We calculate the error probability of those schemes between the Steane [[7,1,3]] code, a distance-3 surface code, and single physical qubits by Monte Carlo simulation under a standard Pauli error model and estimate the resource efficiency of the procedures. A local gate error rate of 10-3 allows us to create high-fidelity logical Bell pairs between any of our chosen codes. We find that a postselected model, where any detected parity flips in code stabilizers result in a restart of the protocol, performs the best.