Fault-Tolerant One-Way Noiseless Amplification for Microwave Bosonic Quantum Information Processing

Microwave quantum information networks require reliable transmission of single-photon propagating modes over lossy channels. In this article, we propose a microwave noiseless linear amplifier (NLA) suitable to circumvent the losses incurred by a flying photon undergoing an amplitude damping channel (ADC). The proposed model is constructed by engineering a simple 1-D four-node cluster state. Contrary to conventional NLAs based on quantum scissors (QS), single-photon amplification is realized without the need for photon number resolving detectors. Entanglement between nodes comprising the device's cluster is achieved by means of a controlled phase gate. Furthermore, photon measurements are implemented by quantum nondemolition detectors, which are currently available as a part of the circuit quantum electrodynamics toolbox. We analyze the performance of our device practically by considering detection inefficiency and dark count probability. We further examine the potential usage of our device in low-power quantum sensing applications and remote secret key generation (SKG). Specifically, we demonstrate the device's ability to prepare loss-free resources offline, and its capacity to overcome the repeaterless bound of SKG. We compare the performance of our device against a QS-NLA for the aforementioned applications, and highlight explicitly the operating conditions under which our device can outperform a QS-NLA. The proposed device is also suitable for applications in the optical domain.