Distributing entanglement in quantum networks

The research presented in this thesis focused on the problem of entanglement distribution. Simply put, the two main problems facing (practical) implementation of entanglement distribution over quantum networks are loss and noise. Quantum repeaters are meant to overcome the effects of loss, but in practice their implementation always comes at the cost of more incurred noise. This additional noise can be overcome by the use of entanglement distillation.
In the first two chapters, we focused on the assessment of a basic building block for quantum networks, a single quantum repeater. We then considered finding schemes for the concatenation of multiple such quantum repeaters, along with the inclusion of basic distillation protocols. Finally, we considered a systematic way of optimising over a relevant class of (more complex) distillation protocols.