Entanglement swapping at telecom wavelengths is at the heart of quantum networking in optical fiber infrastructures. Although entanglement swapping has been demonstrated experimentally so far using various types of entangled photon sources both in near-infrared and telecom wavelength regions, the rate of swapping operation has been too low to be applied to practical quantum protocols, due to limited efficiency of entangled photon sources and photon detectors. Here we demonstrate drastic improvement of the efficiency at telecom wavelength by using two ultra-bright entangled photon sources and four highly efficient superconducting nanowire single photon detectors. We have attained a four-fold coincidence count rate of 108 counts per second, which is three orders higher than the previous experiments at telecom wavelengths. A raw (net) visibility in a Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between the two independent entangled sources was 73.3 ± 1.0% (85.1 ± 0.8%). We performed the teleportation and entanglement swapping, and obtained a fidelity of 76.3% in the swapping test. Our results on the coincidence count rates are comparable with the ones ever recorded in teleportation/swapping and multi-photon entanglement generation experiments at around 800 nm wavelengths. Our setup opens the way to practical implementation of device-independent quantum key distribution and its distance extension by the entanglement swapping as well as multi-photon entangled state generation in telecom band infrastructures with both space and fiber links.

We are developing novel ultra light-weight and high-resolution X-ray micro pore optics for space X-ray telescopes. In our method, curvilinear micro pore structures are firstly fabricated by silicon deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) or X-ray LIGA processes. Secondly, side walls of the micro structures are smoothed by magnetic field assisted finishing and/or hydrogen annealing techniques for high reflectivity mirrors. Thirdly, to focus parallel X-ray lights from astronomical objects, these structures are elastically or plastically bent into a spherical shape. Fourthly, the bent structures are stacked to form a multistage X-ray telescope. In this paper, we report on fabrication and X-ray reflection tests of silicon and nickel X-ray mirrors using the DRIE and LIGA processes, respectively. For the first time, X-ray reflections were confirmed on both of the mirrors. Estimated rms roughnesses were 5 nm and 3 nm for the silicon and nickel mirrors, respectively.

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