Scalable repeater architectures for multi-party states

The vision to develop quantum networks entails multi-user applications, which require the generation of long-distance multi-party entangled states. The current rapid experimental progress in building prototype-networks calls for new design concepts to guide future developments. Here we describe an experimentally feasible scheme implementing a two-dimensional repeater network for robust distribution of three-party entangled states of GHZ type in the presence of excitation losses and detector dark counts — the main sources of errors in real-world hardware. Our approach is based on atomic or solid state ensembles and employs built-in error filtering mechanisms peculiar to intrinsically two-dimensional networks. This allows us to overcome the performance limitation of conventional one-dimensional ensemble-based networks distributing multi-party entangled states and provides an efficient design for future experiments with a clear perspective in terms of scalability.