A QUANTUM MEMORY ASSISTED SATELLITE TO DISTRIBUTE ENTANGLEMENT ON A GLOBAL SCALE

Abstract

Intercontinental quantum communication links are essential to the development of a global Quantum Internet. Recent successful demonstrations of quantum communications using satellite-to-ground links have shown that a space-based quantum network is a promising solution in the near future. Quantum repeaters are interesting but the technological requirements for practical use are yet to be met. In this work, entanglement distribution from a satellite equipped with a long storage time quantum memory is investigated. The software AGI STK is used to compute space-to-ground accesses between a satellite in a sun-synchronous low earth orbit and the set of ground stations considered: the capitals of the G20 members. This scenario enables up to 108 photon pairs to be shared between a city and the rest of the network in a year for a 2h storage time. This work highlights the requirements to achieve in order to develop a space-based global quantum network using a quantum memory.