Quantum repeaters (QRs) provide a way of enabling long distance quantum communication by establishing entangled qubits between remote locations. In this Letter, we investigate a new approach to QRs in which quantum information can be faithfully transmitted via a noisy channel without the use of long distance teleportation, thus eliminating the need to establish remote entangled links. Our approach makes use of small encoding blocks to fault-tolerantly correct both operational and photon loss errors. We describe a way to optimize the resource requirement for these QRs with the aim of the generation of a secure key. Numerical calculations indicate that the number of quantum memory bits at each repeater station required for the generation of one secure key has favorable polylogarithmic scaling with the distance across which the communication is desired.

• Received 8 July 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.250501