Robust creation of entanglement between remote memory qubits

In this Letter we propose a robust quantum repeater architecture building on the original Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller (DLCZ) protocol [L.-M. Duan, M. D. Lukin, J. I. Cirac, and P. Zoller, Nature (London) 414, 413 (2001)]. The architecture is based on two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel-type interference which relaxes the long-distance stability requirements by about 7 orders of magnitude, from subwavelength for the single photon interference required by DLCZ to the coherence length of the photons. Our proposal provides an exciting possibility for robust and realistic long-distance quantum communication.