Activating remote entanglement in a quantum network by local counting of identical particles

Quantum information and communication processing within quantum networks usually employ identical particles. Despite this, the physical role of the quantum statistical nature of particles in large-scale networks remains elusive. Here, we show that just the indistinguishability of fermions allows a new mechanism of entanglement transfer in many-node quantum networks. This process activates remote entanglement among distant sites, which do not share a common past, by only locally counting identical particles and classical communication. These results constitute the key achievement of the present technique and open the way to a more stable multistage transfer of nonlocal quantum correlations based on fermions.