Long distance entanglement swapping and perspectives for a real quantum relay

Entanglement swapping of time-bin qubits over a distance of 1.1 km was demonstrated. The visibility of the 4-fold coincidences conditioned on a successful Bell state measurement was 75.5%/spl plusmn/5%, clearly indicating that the photons were entangled and could violate Bell inequalities (visibility of 70.7%). This latest results confirm that time-bin encoding is robust enough against several decoherence effects in optical fibers.