  We propose a scheme for realizing quantum repeaters with Rydberg-blockade
coupled atomic ensembles, based on a recently proposed collective encoding
strategy. Rydberg-blockade mediated two-qubit gates and efficient cooperative
photon emission are employed to create ensemble-photon entanglement. Thanks to
deterministic entanglement swapping operations via Rydberg-based two-qubit
gates, and to the suppression of multi-excitation errors by the blockade
effect, the entanglement distribution rate of the present scheme is higher by
orders of magnitude than the rates achieved by other ensemble-based repeaters.
We also show how to realize temporal multiplexing with this system, which
offers an additional speedup in entanglement distribution.
