Rethinking Quantum Networking with Advances in Fiber Technology

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 24 Mar 2026] Rethinking Quantum Networking with Advances in Fiber Technology Prateek Mantri, Michael S. Bullock, Aditya Tripathi, Robert Kwolek, Rajveer Nehra, Don Towsley Recent comparisons of quantum repeater protocols have highlighted the strong near-term potential of multiplexed two-way architectures for long-distance quantum communication. At the same time, advances in hollow-core fiber (HCF) technology motivate a re-examination of the physical transmission medium as an architectural lever in quantum network design. In this work, we compare emerging anti-resonant HCFs against conventional silica single-mode fibers (SMFs) in multiplexed two-way quantum repeater networks. We evaluate their performance under both telecom and memory-native transmission, accounting for frequency-conversion overheads, coupling efficiencies, memory decoherence, and operational noise. We find that HCF significantly outperforms SMF across a wide range of regimes. With memory-native transmission, HCF yields up to an order of magnitude improvement in secret-key rate per channel use under realistic conversion efficiencies. Even at telecom wavelengths, HCF enables larger optimal repeater spacing, improving rate--cost tradeoffs and reducing repeater requirements. We further quantify the role of memory quality, hardware efficiency, detector and conversion losses, and two-qubit gate noise in shaping these gains. These results show that recent advances in HCF materially expand the design space of practical terrestrial quantum repeater networks. Comments: 22 pages, 11 figures Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2603.23718 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2603.23718v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.23718 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Prateek Mantri [view email] [v1] Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:07:08 UTC (3,185 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)