Entanglement distillation is an essential ingredient for long distance quantum communications. In the continuous variable setting, Gaussian states play major roles in quantum teleportation, quantum cloning and quantum cryptography. However, entanglement distillation from Gaussian states has not yet been demonstrated. It is made difficult by the no-go theorem stating that no Gaussian operation can distill Gaussian states. Here we demonstrate the entanglement distillation from Gaussian states by using measurement-induced non-Gaussian operations, circumventing the fundamental restriction of the no-go theorem. We observed a gain of entanglement as a result of conditional local subtraction of a single photon or two photons from a two-mode Gaussian state. Furthermore we confirmed that two-photon subtraction also improves Gaussian-like entanglement as specified by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlation. This distilled entanglement can be further employed to downstream applications such as high fidelity quantum teleportation and a loophole-free Bell test.
We propose entanglement measures with asymptotic weak-monotonicity. We show that a normalized form of entanglement measures with the asymptotic weak-monotonicity are lower (upper) bound for the entanglement of cost (distillation).
We investigate asymptotic distillation of entanglement in the presence of an unlimited amount of bound entanglement for bi-partite systems. We show that the distillability is still bounded by the relative entropy of entanglement. This offers a strong support to the fact that bound entanglement does not improve distillation of entanglement.
PhD thesis (University of York). The thesis covers in a unified way the material presented in quant-ph/0403073, quant-ph/0502040, quant-ph/0504160, quant-ph/0510035, quant-ph/0512012 and quant-ph/0603283. It includes two large review chapters on entanglement and distillation.
We construct new entanglement distillation protocols by interpolating between the recurrence and hashing protocols. This leads to asymptotic two-way distillation protocols, resulting in an improvement of the distillation rate for all mixed Bell diagonal entangled states, even for the ones with very high fidelity. We also present a method how entanglement-assisted distillation protocols can be converted into non-entanglement-assisted protocols with the same yield.
We show that the entanglement of cost and entanglement of distillation can be vague when we consider a more general form of entanglement manipulation in which we collectively deal with not only states of our concern but also other states. We introduce the most general entanglement manipulation in which the formation and distillation can be simultaneously performed. We show that in a certain case entanglement manipulations are reversible with respect to the most general entanglement manipulation. This broadens our scope of vision on the irreversibility of entanglement manipulations.
In previous papers, we expressed the Entanglement of Formation in terms of Conditional Mutual Information (CMI). In this brief paper, we express the Entanglement of Distillation in terms of CMI.
This paper try to probe the relation of distinguishing locally and distillation of entanglement. The distinguishing information (DI) and the maximal distinguishing information (MDI) of a set of pure states are defined. The interpretation of distillation of entanglement in term of information is given. The relation between the maximal distinguishing information and distillable entanglement is gained. As a application of this relation the distillable entanglement of Bell-diagonal states is present.
Simplified scheme for continuous-variable entanglement distillation: multicopy distillation of Gaussian entanglement without heralding Gaussian measurements
We present a way for the entanglement distillation of genuine mixed state. Different from the conventional mixed state in entanglement purification protocol, each components of the mixed state in our protocol is a less-entangled state, while it is always a maximally entangled state. With the help of the weak cross-Kerr nonlinearity, this entanglement distillation protocol does not require the sophisticated single-photon detectors. Moreover, the distilled high quality entangled state can be retained to perform the further distillation. These properties make it more convenient in practical appli…
Entanglement degradation in open quantum systems is reviewed in the Choi-Jamiołkowski representation of linear maps. In addition to physical processes of entanglement dissociation and entanglement annihilation, we consider quantum dynamics transforming arbitrary input states into those that remain positive under partial transpose (PPT-inducing channels). Such evolutions form a convex subset of distillation-prohibiting channels. A relation between the above channels and entanglement-binding ones is clarified. An example of the distillation-prohibiting map $Φ\otimesΦ$ is given, where $Φ$ is not …
A complementary behavior between local mutual information and average output entanglement is derived for arbitrary bipartite ensembles. This leads to bounds on the yield of entanglement in distillation protocols that involve disinguishing. This bound is saturated in the hashing protocol for distillation, for Bell-diagonal states.
The distribution and processing of quantum entanglement form the basis of quantum communication and quantum computing. The realization of the two is difficult because quantum information inherently has a high susceptibility to decoherence, i.e. to uncontrollable information loss to the environment. For entanglement distribution, a proposed solution to this problem is capable of fully eliminating decoherence; namely iterative entanglement distillation. This approach builds on a large number of distillation steps each of which extracts a number of weakly decohered entangled states from a larger …
A new type of complementary relation is found between locally accessible information and final average entanglement for given ensemble. It is also shown that in some well known distillation protocol, this complementary relation is optimally satisfied. We discuss the interesting trade-off between locally accessible information and distillable entanglement for some states.
We show the equivalence of two approaches to the design of entanglement distillation protocols. The first approach is based on local unitary operations that yield permutations of tensor products of Bell states. The second approach is based on stabilizer codes.
Sources of entangled photon pairs using two parametric down-converters are capable of generating interchangeable entanglement in two different degrees of freedom. The connection between these two degrees of freedom allows the control of the entanglement properties of one, by acting on the other degree of freedom. We demonstrate experimentally, the quantum distillation of the position entanglement using polarization analyzers.
This paper tries to probe the relation between the local distinguishability of orthogonal quantum states and the distillation of entanglement. An new interpretation for the distillation of entanglement and the distinguishability of orthogonal quantum states in terms of information is given, respectively. By constraining our discussion on a special protocol we give a necessary and sufficient condition for the local distinguishability of the orthogonal pure states, and gain the maximal yield of the distillable entanglement. It is shown that the information entropy, the locally distinguishability…
We introduce a new protocol in continuous variable entanglement distillation that requires only linear temporal and constant physical or spatial resources.Compared with the existing protocols, our protocol uses atom-photon entanglement to substitute for atom-atom entanglement in existing protol, which will not only save the number of quantum memories, but also has the advantages in operation efficiency and temporal saving. The distillation can be realized by a fixed model of iterations, in which only three quantum memories and photon detectors are required.
Entanglement distillation is a fundamental building block in long-distance quantum communication. Though known to be useless on their own for distilling Gaussian entangled states, local Gaussian operations may still help to improve non-Gaussian entanglement distillation schemes. Here we show that by applying local squeezing operations, both the performance and the efficiency of existing distillation protocols can be enhanced. We derive the optimal enhancement through local Gaussian unitaries, which can be obtained even in the most natural scenario when Gaussian mixed entangled states are share…
In this paper, we study entanglement distillation of multipartite continuous-variable Gaussian entangled states. Following Opatrný \emph{et al.}'s photon subtraction (PS) scheme, the probability of successful distillation decreases exponentially with the number of parties $N$. However, here, we shall propose an entanglement distillation scheme whose success probability scales as a constant with $N$. Our protocol employs several local squeezers, but it requires only a single PS operation. Using the logarithmic negativity as a measure of entanglement, we find that both the success probability an…
We investigate quantum repeaters in the context of quantum key distribution. We optimize the secret key rate per memory per second with respect to different distillation protocols and distillation strategies. For this purpose, we also derive an analytical expression for the average number of entangled pairs created by the quantum repeater, including classical communication times for entanglement swapping and entanglement distillation. We investigate the impact of this classical communication time on the secret key rate. We finally study the effect of the detector efficiency on the secret key r…
It is shown that if a mixed state can be distilled to the singlet form, it must violate partial transposition criterion [A. Peres, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 1413 (1996)]. It implies that there are two qualitatively different types of entanglement: ``free'' entanglement which is distillable, and ``bound'' entanglement which cannot be brought to the singlet form useful for quantum communication purposes. Possible physical meaning of the result is discussed.
Measures of entanglement can be employed for the analysis of numerous quantum information protocols. Due to computational convenience, logarithmic negativity is often the choice in the case of continuous variable systems. In this work, we analyse a continuous variable measurement-based entanglement distillation experiment using a collection of entanglement measures. This includes: logarithmic negativity, entanglement of formation, distillable entanglement, relative entropy of entanglement, and squashed entanglement. By considering the distilled entanglement as a function of the success probabi…
It has been shown that entanglement distillation of Gaussian entangled states by means of local photon subtraction can be improved by local Gaussian transformations. Here we show that a similar effect can be expected for the distillation of an asymmetric Gaussian entangled state that is produced by a single squeezed beam. We show that for low initial entanglement, our largely simplified protocol generates more entanglement than previous proposed protocols. Furthermore, we show that the distillation scheme also works efficiently on decohered entangled states as well as with a practical photon s…
Even though entanglement is very vulnerable to interactions with the environment, it can be created by purely dissipative processes. Yet, the attainable degree of entanglement is profoundly limited in the presence of noise sources. We show that distillation can also be realized dissipatively, such that a highly entanglement steady state is obtained. The schemes put forward here display counterintuitive phenomena, such as improved performance if noise is added to the system. We also show how dissipative distillation can be employed in a continuous quantum repeater architecture, in which the res…
We present an inequality for detecting entanglement and distillability of arbitrary dimensional bipartite systems. This inequality provides a sufficient condition of entanglement for bipartite mixed states, and a necessary and sufficient condition of entanglement for bipartite pure states. Moreover, the inequality also gives a necessary and sufficient condition for distillability.
In this paper, we propose two general entanglement distillation protocols, which can concentrate the non-maximally entangled pure W class state. The general protocols are mainly based on the unitary transformation on the auxiliary particle and one of the three entangled particles, and in the second protocol, the entanglement distillation includes two meanings, namely, extracting the concentrated tripartite entangled W state and obtaining the maximally entangled bipartite state from the garbage state, which gives no contribution to the distillation of non-maximally entangled pure W class state.…
Quantum low density parity check (QLDPC) codes are useful primitives for quantum information processing because they can be encoded and decoded efficiently. Besides, the error correcting capability of a few QLDPC codes exceeds the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov bound. Here, we report a numerical performance analysis of an adaptive entanglement distillation scheme using QLDPC codes. In particular, we find that the expected yield of our adaptive distillation scheme to combat depolarization errors exceed that of Leung and Shor whenever the error probability is less than about 0.07 or greater than abou…
We discuss a specific entanglement distillation scheme under the constraint of finite samples of entangled qubit pairs. It is shown that an iterative process can be explicitly formulated. The average fidelity of this process can be enhanced by introducing conditional storing of entangled qubit pairs in each step of the iteration. We investigate the corresponding limitations on the size and the initial fidelity of the sample.
The goal of entanglement distillation is to turn a large number of weakly entangled states into a smaller number of highly entangled ones. Practical entanglement distillation schemes offer a tradeoff between the fidelity to the target state, and the probability of successful distillation. Exploiting such tradeoffs is of interest in the design of quantum repeater protocols. Here, we present a number of methods to assess and optimize entanglement distillation schemes. We start by giving a numerical method to compute upper bounds on the maximum achievable fidelity for a desired probability of suc…
A recently proposed purification method, in which the Zeno-like measurements of a subsystem can bring about a distillation of another subsystem in interaction with the former, is utilized to yield entangled states between distant systems. It is shown that the measurements of a two-level system locally interacting with other two spatially separated not coupled subsystems, can distill entangled states from the latter irrespectively of the initial states of the two subsystems.
We investigate the irreversibility of entanglement distillation for a symmetric d-1 parameter family of mixed bipartite quantum states acting on Hilbert spaces of arbitrary dimension d x d. We prove that in this family the entanglement cost is generically strictly larger than the distillable entanglement, such that the set of states for which the distillation process is asymptotically reversible is of measure zero. This remains true even if the distillation process is catalytically assisted by pure state entanglement and every operation is allowed, which preserves the positivity of the partial…
Entanglement distribution between distant parties is an essential component to most quantum communication protocols. Unfortunately, decoherence effects such as phase noise in optical fibers are known to demolish entanglement. Iterative (multistep) entanglement distillation protocols have long been proposed to overcome decoherence, but their probabilistic nature makes them inefficient since the success probability decays exponentially with the number of steps. Quantum memories have been contemplated to make entanglement distillation practical, but suitable quantum memories are not realised to d…
In this paper, we first propose a general entanglement distillation protocol for three-particle W class state, which can concentrate the state (non-maximally entangled W state). The general protocol is mainly based on the unitary transformations on the auxiliary particles and the entangled particles, and a feasible physical scheme is suggested based on the cavity QED techniques. The protocol and scheme can be extended to the entanglement concentration of N-particle case.
Logic-qubit entanglement has attracted much attention in both quantum communication and quantum computation. Here, we present an efficient protocol to distill the logic-qubit entanglement with the help of cross-Kerr nonlinearity. This protocol not only can purify the logic bit-flip error and logic phase-flip error, but also can correct the physical bit-flip error completely. We use cross-Kerr nonlinearity to construct quantum nondemolition detectors. Our distillation protocol for logic-qubit entanglement may be useful for the practical applications in quantum information, especially in long-di…
Distillation of entanglement using only Gaussian operations is an important primitive in quantum communication, quantum repeater architectures, and distributed quantum computing. Existing distillation protocols for continuous degrees of freedom are only known to converge to a Gaussian state when measurements yield precisely the vacuum outcome. In sharp contrast, non-Gaussian states can be deterministically converted into Gaussian states while preserving their second moments, albeit by usually reducing their degree of entanglement. In this work - based on a novel instance of a non-commutative c…
Entanglement distillation, an essential quantum information processing task, refers to the conversion from multiple copies of noisy entangled states to a smaller number of highly entangled states. In this work, we study the non-asymptotic fundamental limits for entanglement distillation. We investigate the optimal tradeoff between the distillation rate, the number of prepared states, and the error tolerance. First, we derive the one-shot distillable entanglement under completely positive partial transpose preserving operations as a semidefinite program and demonstrate an exact characterization…
We propose a scheme for distillation of free bipartite entanglement from bipartite bound-entangled states. The crucial element of our scheme is an ancillary system that is coupled to the initial bound-entangled state via appropriate weak measurements. We show that in this protocol free entanglement can be always generated with nonzero probability by using a single copy of the bound-entangled state. We also derive a lower bound on the entanglement cost of the protocol, and conclude that, on average, applying weaker measurements results in relatively higher values of free entanglement as well as…
Entanglement distillation is a procedure for extracting from one or more pairs of entangled qubits a smaller number of pairs with a higher degree of entanglement that is essential for many applications in quantum information science. Schmidt projection is a unique distillation method that can be applied to more than two pairs of entangled qubits at the same time with high efficiency. We implement the Schmidt projection protocol by applying single-photon two-qubit quantum logic to a partially hyperentangled four-qubit input state. The basic elements of the procedure are characterized and we con…
Quantum entanglement plays crucial roles in quantum information processing. Quantum entangled states have become the key ingredient in the rapidly expanding field of quantum information science. Although the nonclassical nature of entanglement has been recognized for many years, considerable efforts have been taken to understand and characterize its properties recently. In this review, we introduce some recent results in the theory of quantum entanglement. In particular separability criteria based on the Bloch representation, covariance matrix, normal form and entanglement witness; lower bound…
A key ingredient of quantum repeaters is entanglement distillation, i.e., the generation of high-fidelity entangled qubits from a larger set of pairs with lower fidelity. Here, we present entanglement distillation protocols based on qubit couplings that originate from exchange interaction. First, we make use of asymmetric bilateral two-qubit operations generated from anisotropic exchange interaction and show how to distill entanglement using two input pairs. We furthermore consider the case of three input pairs coupled through isotropic exchange. Here, we characterize a set of protocols which …
We show that bipartite quantum states of any dimension, which do not have a positive partial transpose, become 1-distillable when one adds an infinitesimal amount of bound entanglement. To this end we investigate the activation properties of a new class of symmetric bound entangled states of full rank. It is shown that in this set there exist universal activator states capable of activating the distillation of any NPPT state.
The potential impact of future quantum networks hinges on high-quality quantum entanglement shared between network nodes. Unavoidable real-world imperfections necessitate means to improve remote entanglement by local quantum operations. Here we realize entanglement distillation on a quantum network primitive of distant electron-nuclear two-qubit nodes. We demonstrate the heralded generation of two copies of a remote entangled state through single-photon-mediated entangling of the electrons and robust storage in the nuclear spins. After applying local two-qubit gates, single-shot measurements h…
We present new algorithms for mixed-state multi-copy entanglement distillation for pairs of qubits. Our algorithms perform significantly better than the best known algorithms. Better algorithms can be derived that are tuned for specific initial states. The new algorithms are based on a characterization of the group of all locally realizable permutations of the 4^n possible tensor products of n Bell states.
We propose a scheme for both distilling and quantifying entanglement, applicable to individual copies of an arbitrary unknown two-qubit state. It is realized in a usual two-qubit interferometry with local filtering. Proper filtering operation for the maximal distillation of the state is achieved, by erasing single-qubit interference, and then the concurrence of the state is determined directly from the visibilities of two-qubit interference. We compare the scheme with full state tomography.
We show that a mixed state $ρ=\sum_{mn}a_{mn}|m> < n|$ can be realized by an ensemble of pure states $\{p_{k}, |ϕ_{k} > \}$ where $|ϕ_{k}>=\sum_{m}\sqrt{a_{mm}}e^{iθ_{m}^{k}}|m>$. Employing this form, we discuss the relative entropy of entanglement of Schmidt correlated states. Also, we calculate the distillable entanglement of a class of mixed states.
In this paper, we proposed a physical scheme to concentrate the non-maximally entangled atomic pure states via cavity QED by using atomic collision in a far-off-resonant cavity. The most distinctive advantage of our scheme is that there is no excitation of cavity mode during the distillation procedure. Therefore the requirement on the quality of cavity is greatly loosened.
We propose a scheme of multipartite entanglement distillation driven by a complementary pair of stabilizer measurements, to distill directly a wider range of states beyond the stabilizer code states (such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states). We make our idea explicit by constructing a recurrence protocol for the 3-qubit W state. Noisy W states resulting from typical decoherence can be directly purified in a few steps, if their initial fidelity is larger than a threshold. For general input mixed states, we observe distillations to hierarchical fixed points, i.e., not only to the W state …
Entanglement distillation refers to the task of transforming a collection of weakly entangled pairs into fewer highly entangled ones. It is a core ingredient in quantum repeater protocols, needed to transmit entanglement over arbitrary distances in order to realise quantum key distribution schemes. Usually, it is assumed that the initial entangled pairs are i.i.d. distributed and uncorrelated with each other, an assumption that might not be reasonable at all in any entanglement generation process involving memory channels. Here, we introduce a framework that captures entanglement distillation …
We extend the idea of entanglement concentration for pure states(Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 88}, 187903) to the case of mixed states. The scheme works only with particle statistics and local operations, without the need of any other interactions. We show that the maximally entangled state can be distilled out when the initial state is pure, otherwise the entanglement of the final state is less than one. The distillation efficiency is a product of the diagonal elements of the initial state, it takes the maximum 50%, the same as the case for pure states.
We put forward a method for optimized distillation of partly entangled pairs of qubits into a smaller number of more entangled pairs by recurrent local unitary operations and projections. Optimized distillation is achieved by minimization of a cost function with up to 30 real parameters, which is chosen to be sensitive to the fidelity and the projection probability at each step. We show that in many cases this approach can significantly improve the distillation efficiency in comparison to the present methods.
Entanglement distillation is a basic task in quantum information, and the distillable entanglement of three bipartite reduced density matrices from a tripartite pure state has been studied in [Phys. Rev. A 84, 012325 (2011)]. We extend this result to tripartite mixed states by studying a conjectured matrix inequality, namely $\mathop{\rm rank}(\sum_i R_i \otimes S_i)\leq K \mathop{\rm rank}(\sum_i R_i^T \otimes S_i)$ holds for any bipartite matrix $M=\sum_i R_i \otimes S_i$ and Schmidt rank $K$. We prove that the conjecture holds for $M$ with $K=3$ and some special $M$ with arbitrary $K$.
We present a detailed theoretical analysis for the distillation of one copy of a mixed two-mode continuous-variable entangled state using beamsplitters and coherent photon-detection techniques, including conventional on-off detectors and photon number resolving detectors. The initial Gaussian mixed-entangled states are generated by transmitting a two-mode squeezed state through a lossy bosonic channel, corresponding to the primary source of errors in current approaches to optical quantum communication. We provide explicit formulas to calculate the entanglement in terms of logarithmic negativit…
We evaluate the one-shot entanglement of assistance for an arbitrary bipartite state. This yields another interesting result, namely a characterization of the one-shot distillable entanglement of a bipartite pure state. This result is shown to be stronger than that obtained by specializing the one-shot hashing bound to pure states. Finally, we show how the one-shot result yields the operational interpretation of the asymptotic entanglement of assistance proved in [Smolin et al., Phys. Rev. A 72, 052317 (2005)].
