Noise and photon loss encountered on quantum channels pose a major challenge for reliable entanglement generation in quantum networks. In near-term networks, heralding is required to inform endpoints of successfully generated entanglement. If after heralding, entanglement fidelity is too low, entanglement purification can be utilized to probabilistically increase fidelity. Traditionally, purification protocols proceed as follows: generate heralded EPR pairs, execute a series of quantum operations on two or more pairs between two nodes, and classically communicate results to check for success. Purification may require several rounds while qubits are stored in memories, vulnerable to decoherence. In this work, we explore the notion of optimistic purification in a single link setup, wherein classical communication required for heralding and purification is delayed, possibly to the end of the process. Optimism reduces the overall time EPR pairs are stored in memory. While this is beneficial for fidelity, it can result in lower rates due to the continued execution of protocols with sparser heralding and purification outcome updates. We apply optimism to the entanglement pumping scheme, ground- and satellite-based EPR generation sources, and current state-of-the-art purification circuits. We evaluate sensitivity performance to a number of parameters including link length, EPR source rate and fidelity, and memory coherence time. We observe that our optimistic protocols are able to increase fidelity, while the traditional approach becomes detrimental to it for long distances. We study the trade-off between rate and fidelity under entanglement-based QKD, and find that optimistic schemes can yield higher rates compared to non-optimistic counterparts, with most advantages seen in scenarios with low initial fidelity and short coherence times.
We investigate the purification of entangled states by local actions using a variant of entanglement swapping. We show that there exists a measure of entanglement which is conserved in this type of purification procedure.
We give a review on entanglement purification for bipartite and multipartite quantum states, with the main focus on theoretical work carried out by our group in the last couple of years. We discuss entanglement purification in the context of quantum communication, where we emphasize its close relation to quantum error correction. Various bipartite and multipartite entanglement purification protocols are discussed, and their performance under idealized and realistic conditions is studied. Several applications of entanglement purification in quantum communication and computation are presented, w…
We develop theoretical and numerical tools for the quantification of entanglement in systems with continuous degrees of freedom. Continuous variable entanglement swapping is introduced and based on this idea we develop methods of entanglement purification for continuous variable systems. The success of these entanglement purification methods is then assessed using these tools.
We present a deterministic entanglement purification protocol (EPP) working for currently available experiment technique. In this protocol, we resort to the robust time-bin entanglement to purify the polarization entanglement determinately, which is quite different from the previous EPPs. After purification, one can obtain a completely pure maximally entangled pair with the success probability of 100%, in principle. As the maximal polarization entanglement is of vice importance in long-distance quantum communication, this protocol may have a wide application.
In tasks, where multipartite entanglement plays a central role, state purification is, due to inevitable noise, a crucial part of the procedure. We consider a scenario exploiting the multipartite entanglement in a straightforward multipartite purification algorithm and compare it to bipartite purification procedures combined with state teleportation. While complete purification requires an infinite amount of input states in both cases, we show that for an imperfect output fidelity the multipartite procedure exhibits a major advantage in terms of input states used.
We give a proof that entanglement purification, even with noisy apparatus, is sufficient to disentangle an eavesdropper (Eve) from the communication channel. Our proof applies to all possible attacks (individual and coherent). Due to the quantum nature of the entanglement purification protocol, it is also possible to use the obtained quantum channel for secure transmission of quantum information.
Entanglement purification is a powerful method to distill the high-quality entanglement from low-quality entanglement. In the paper, we propose an efficient two-step entanglement purification protocol (EPP) for the polarization entanglement by using only one copy of two-photon hyperentangled state in polarization, spatial-mode, and time-bin DOFs. We suppose that the entanglement in all DOFs suffer from channel noise. In two purification steps, the parties can reduce the bit-flip error and phase-flip error in polarization DOF by consuming the imperfect entanglement in the spatial-mode and time-…
We present a novel method to purify quantum states, i.e. purification through Zeno-like measurements, and show an application to entanglement purification.
We introduce a measure of both quantum as well as classical correlations in a quantum state, the entanglement of purification. We show that the (regularized) entanglement of purification is equal to the entanglement cost of creating a state $ρ$ asymptotically from maximally entangled states, with negligible communication. We prove that the classical mutual information and the quantum mutual information divided by two are lower bounds for the regularized entanglement of purification. We present numerical results of the entanglement of purification for Werner states in ${\cal H}_2 \otimes {\cal …
We present an efficient entanglement purification protocol with hyperentanglement in which additional spatial entanglement is utilized to purify the two-particle polarization-entangled state. The bit-flip error and phase-flip error can be corrected and eliminated in one step. Two remote parties can obtainmaximally entangled polarization states deterministically and only passive linear optics are employed. We also discuss the protocol with practical quantum source and noisy channel.
We present multiparty entanglement purification protocols that are capable of purifying arbitrary graph states directly. We develop recurrence and breeding protocols and compare our methods with strategies based on bipartite entanglement purification in static and communication scenarios. We find that direct multiparty purification is of advantage with respect to achievable yields and minimal required fidelity in static scenarios, and with respect to obtainable fidelity in the case of noisy operations in both scenarios.
We present an improved protocol for entanglement purification of bipartite mixed states. The protocol requires two-way classical communication and hence implies an improved lower bound on the quantum capacity with two-way classical communication of the quantum depolarizing channel.
Entanglement purification is to distill high-quality entangled states from low-quality entangled states. It is a key step in quantum repeaters, determines the efficiency and communication rates of quantum communication protocols, and is hence of central importance in long-distance communications and quantum networks. In this work, we report the first experimental demonstration of deterministic entanglement purification using polarization and spatial mode hyperentanglement. After purification, the fidelity of polarization entanglement arises from $0.268\pm0.002$ to $0.989\pm0.001$. Assisted wit…
We theoretically study bipartite entanglement purification with neutral atoms via cavity-assistant interaction and linear optical elements. We focus on entanglement distillation and the recurrence protocol, whose performances under idealized and realistic conditions are discussed. The implementation of these purification protocols has been tested with numerical simulations. We analyze the performance and stability of all required operations and emphasize that all techniques are feasible with current experimental technology.
Entanglement of purification was introduced by Terhal et al. for characterizing the bound of the generation of correlated states from maximally entangled states with sublinear size of classical communication. On the other hand, M. Horodecki obtained the optimal compression rate with a mixed states ensemble in the visible setting. In this paper, we prove that the optimal visible compression rate for mixed states is equal to the limit of the regularized entanglement of purification of the state corresponding to the given ensemble. This result gives a new interpretation to the entanglement of pur…
We derive lower bounds for the attainable fidelity of standard entanglement purification protocols when local operations and measurements are subjected to errors. We introduce an error parameter which measures the distance between the ideal completely positive map describing a purification step and the one in the presence of errors. We derive non--linear maps for a lower bound of the fidelity at each purification step in terms of this parameter.
We investigate the possibility of characterizing two-party entanglement by measuring correlations of Stokes operators in polarized bright light beams. We adapt a general separability criterion to such operators. We then show that entanglement purification can only be singled out for a particular protocol.
Entanglement purification protocols play an important role in the distribution of entangled systems, which is necessary for various quantum information processing applications. We consider the effects of photo-detector efficiency and bandwidth, channel loss and mode-mismatch on the operation of an optical entanglement purification protocol. We derive necessary detector and mode-matching requirements to facilitate practical operation of such a scheme, without having to resort to destructive coincidence type demonstrations.
We present a multipartite entanglement purification scheme in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state for electrons based on their spins and their charges. This scheme works for purification with two steps, i.e., bit-flipping error correction and phase-error flip error correction. By repeating these two steps, the parties in quantum communication can get some high-fidelity multipartite entangled electronic systems.
We investigate entanglement purification protocols based on hashing, where a large number of noisy entangled pairs is jointly processed to obtain a reduced number of perfect, noiseless copies. While hashing and breeding protocols are the only purification protocols that asymptotically obtain a nonzero yield, they are not applicable in a realistic scenario if local gates and measurements are imperfect. We show that such problems can be overcome by a compact measurement-based implementation, yielding entanglement purification schemes with nonzero yield that are applicable also in noisy scenarios…
An iterative random procedure is considered allowing an entanglement purification of a class of multi-mode quantum states. In certain cases, a complete purification may be achieved using only a single signal state preparation. A physical implementation based on beam splitter arrays and non-linear elements is suggested. The influence of loss is analyzed in the example of a purification of entangled N-mode coherent states.
The need to retain the relative phases in quantum mechanics implies an addition law parametrized by a phase of two density operators required for the purification of a density matrix. This is shown with quantum tomography and the Wigner function. Entanglement is determined in terms of phase dependent multiplication.
Multipartite entanglement purification is revisited by using the Local operations and classical communications(LOCCs). We demonstrate our idea by considering the tripartite case, i.e. the purification of tripartite entanglement. We express the general tripartite entangled states in a special representation of total spin operators $J_{123}^{2}$ and $% J_{12}^{2}$ of tripartite system with eigenvalues 15/4 and 2 respectively. This basis is a \textit{genuine basis} because it consists of of all the genuine entangled states of tripartite system. Our protocol is a recurrence one, and only two copie…
We give a proof that entanglement purification, even with noisy apparatus, is sufficient to disentangle an eavesdropper (Eve) from the communication channel. In the security regime, the purification process factorises the overall initial state into a tensor-product state of Alice and Bob, on one side, and Eve on the other side, thus establishing a completely private, albeit noisy, quantum communication channel between Alice and Bob. The security regime is found to coincide for all practical purposes with the purification regime of a two-way recurrence protocol. This makes two-way entanglement …
Purification schemes for multi-particle entangled states cannot be treated as straightforward extensions of those for two particles because of the lack of symmetry they possess. We propose purification protocols for a wide range of mixed entangled states of many particles. These are useful for understanding entanglement, and will be of practical significance in multi-user cryptographic schemes or distributed quantum computation and communication. We show that operating locally on multi-particle entangled states directly is more efficient than relying on two-particle purification.
We show that the fidelity result of advantage distillation (Bennett et al, Phys. Rev. Lett., 76, 722(1996)) is not only for the product state of raw pairs, it is actually correct with whatever form of state of raw pairs. We then give a general theorem for unconditional entanglement purification. This theorem lists the conditions on which the fidelity result of a purification protocol keeps unchanged from product form of raw-pair state and arbitrary form of raw-pair state. Using this theorem, we find that all existing purification puricfication can work for arbitrary initial state of raw pairs.
We investigate multiparticle entanglement purification schemes which allow one to purify all two colorable graph states, a class of states which includes e.g. cluster states, GHZ states and codewords of various error correction codes. The schemes include both recurrence protocols and hashing protocols. We analyze these schemes under realistic conditions and observe for a generic error model that the threshold value for imperfect local operations depends on the structure of the corresponding interaction graph, but is otherwise independent of the number of parties. The qualitative behavior can b…
We investigate efficient entanglement purification through double selection process. This method works with higher noise thresholds for the communication channels and local operations, and achieves higher fidelity of purified states. Furthermore it provides a yield comparable to the usual protocol with single selection. It is shown by general considerations that the double selection is optimal to remove the first-order errors, achieving the upper bound on the fidelity of purified states in the low noise regime. The double selection is also applied to purification of multi-partite entanglement …
We have applied an entanglement purification protocol to produce a single entangled pair of photons capable of violating a CHSH Bell inequality from two pairs that individually could not. The initial poorly-entangled photons were created by a controllable decoherence that introduced complex errors. All of the states were reconstructed using quantum state tomography which allowed for a quantitative description of the improvement of the state after purification.
We suggest and demonstrate a scheme to compensate spatial and spectral decoherence effects in the generation of polarization entangled states by type-I parametric downconversion. In our device a programmable spatial light modulator imposes a polarization dependent phase-shift on different spatial sections of the overall downconversion output and this effect is exploited to realize an effective purification technique for polarization entanglement.
Parametric down-conversion can produce photons that are entangled both in polarization and in space. Here we show how the spatial entanglement can be used to purify the polarization entanglement using only linear optical elements. Spatial entanglement as an additional resource leads to a substantial improvement in entanglement output compared to a previous scheme. Interestingly, in the present context the thermal character of down-conversion sources can be turned into an advantage. Our scheme is realizable with current technology.
Recently Xiao et al. proposed a scheme for entanglement purification based on doubly entangled photon states (Phys. Rev. A 77(2008) 042315). We modify their scheme for improving the efficiency of entanglement purification. This modified scheme contains two steps, i.e., the bit-flip error correction and the entanglement purification of phase-flip errors. All the photon pairs in the first step can be kept as all the bit-flip errors are corrected. For purifying the phase-flip errors, a wavelength conversion process is needed. This scheme has the advantage of high efficiency and it requires the or…
An entanglement purification scheme for arbitrary unknown(mixed and pure non-maximally) entangled ionic states is proposed by using linear optical elements. The main advantage of the scheme is that not only two-ion maximally entangled pairs but also four-ion maximally entangled pairs can be extracted from the less entangled pairs. The scheme is within current technology.
We describe an entanglement purification protocol (EPP) for multipartite three-level atomic entangled pair using photonic Faraday rotation. In this EPP, the multipartite atomic entangled state can be purified with the help of some single photons. This protocol resorts to the photonic Faraday rotation to realize the function of the controlled-Not (CNOT) gate. The purified multipartite atomic entangled state can be retained and to be repeated to reach a higher fidelity.
We study the use of entanglement purification for quantum communication over long distances. For distances much longer than the coherence length of a corresponding noisy quantum channel, the fidelity of transmission is usually so low that standard purification methods are not applicable. It is however possible to divide the channel into shorter segments that are purified separately and then connected by the method of entanglement swapping. This method can be much more efficient than schemes based on quantum error correction, as it makes explicit use of two-way classical communication. An impor…
High-quality long-distance entanglement is essential for both quantum communication and scalable quantum networks. Entanglement purification is to distill high-quality entanglement from low-quality entanglement in a noisy environment and it plays a key role in quantum repeaters. The previous significant entanglement purification experiments require two pairs of low-quality entangled states and were demonstrated in table-top. Here we propose and report a high-efficiency and long-distance entanglement purification using only one pair of hyperentangled states. We also demonstrate its practical ap…
We describe an entanglement purification protocol to generate maximally entangled states with high efficiencies from two-mode squeezed states or from mixed Gaussian continuous entangled states. The protocol relies on a local quantum non-demolition measurement of the total excitation number of several continuous variable entangled pairs. We propose an optical scheme to do this kind of measurement using cavity enhanced cross--Kerr interactions.
In the framework of cavity QED, we propose a practical scheme to purify dynamically a bipartite entangled state using short chains of atoms coupled to high-finesse optical cavities. In contrast to conventional entanglement purification protocols, we avoid CNOT gates, thus reducing complicated pulse sequences and superfluous qubit operations. Our interaction scheme works in a deterministic way, and together with entanglement distribution and swapping, opens a route towards efficient quantum repeaters for long-distance quantum communication.
It is shown that ponderomotive force can be used to purify entangled states. The protocol is based on the possibility to exploit such force for a local quantum nondemolition measurement of the total excitation number of continuos variable entangled pairs.
We present a way for entanglement purification based on two parametric down-conversion (PDC) sources with cross-Kerr nonlinearities. It is comprised of two processes. The first one is a primary entanglement purification protocol for PDC sources with nondestructive quantum nondemolition (QND) detectors by transferring the spatial entanglement of photon pairs to their polarization. In this time, the QND detectors act as the role of controlled-not (CNot) gates. Also they can distinguish the photon number of the spatial modes, which provides a good way for the next process to purify the entangleme…
We investigate novel protocols for entanglement purification of qubit Bell pairs. Employing genetic algorithms for the design of the purification circuit, we obtain shorter circuits achieving higher success rates and better final fidelities than what is currently available in the literature. We provide a software tool for analytical and numerical study of the generated purification circuits, under customizable error models. These new purification protocols pave the way to practical implementations of modular quantum computers and quantum repeaters. Our approach is particularly attentive to the…
A novel method of purification, purification through Zeno-like measurements [H. Nakazato, T. Takazawa, and K. Yuasa, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 060401 (2003)], is discussed extensively and applied to a few simple qubit systems. It is explicitly demonstrated how it works and how it is optimized. As possible applications, schemes for initialization of multiple qubits and entanglement purification are presented, and their efficiency is investigated in detail. Simplicity and flexibility of the idea allow us to apply it to various kinds of settings in quantum information and computation, and would provid…
We give a detailed description of the entanglement purification protocol which generates maximally entangled states with high efficiencies from realistic Gaussian continuous variable entangled states. The physical implementation of this protocol is extensively analyzed using high finesse cavities and cavity enhanced cross Kerr nonlinearities. In particular, we take into account many imperfections in the experimental scheme and calculate their influences. Quantitative requirements are given for the relevant experimental parameters.
We propose an entanglement purification protocol for high-dimensional multipartite systems. In the protocol we can select a subensemble in a pure generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state. This post-selection can be made by detecting the noise which contaminated the initial pure ensemble when the systems past through a noisy environment. For the detection of noise we investigate correlation properties of GHZ states and analyze their possible errors due to a noisy environment. We show that the presented protocol is more efficient than a simple generalization of the purification protoc…
We present a proposal for entanglement purification of the continuous-variable quantum state of two propagating optical fields. The scheme is based on letting each field interact with a local node, an atomic ensemble, whose internal collective excitation plays the role of an ancillary continuous variable resource. Entanglement purification is achieved by a dichotomic measurement, representing the required non-Gaussian element, and which consists in detecting the presence or absence of collective excitations in the atomic ensemble. This scheme can be extended to networks, where the nodes are si…
We study the problem of general entanglement purification protocols. Suppose Alice and Bob share a bipartite state $ρ$ which is ``reasonably close'' to perfect EPR pairs. The only information Alice and Bob possess is a lower bound on the fidelity of $ρ$ and a maximally entangled state. They wish to ``purify'' $ρ$ using local operations and classical communication and create a state that is arbitrarily close to EPR pairs. We prove that on average, Alice and Bob cannot increase the fidelity of the input state significantly. We also construct protocols that may fail with a small probability, and …
We describe an entanglement purification protocol (EPP) for atomic entangled pair using photonic Faraday rotation. It is shown that after the two single photons input-output process in cavity QED, the high quality entangled atomic state can be obtained from the low quality mixed entangled atomic states. Different from other EPPs, the two pairs of mixed states do not need to intact directly. As the photonic Faraday rotation works on the low-Q cavities, this EPP is useful in both quantum communication and computation.
Recently, the theoretical work of Fröwis and W. Dür (Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{106}, 110402 (2011)) and the experiment of Lu \emph{et al.} (Nat. Photon. \textbf{8}, 364 (2014)) both showed that the logic-qubit entanglement has its potential application in future quantum communication and quantum network. However, the entanglement will suffer from the noise and decoherence. In this paper, we will investigate the entanglement purification for logic-qubit entanglement. We show that both the bit-flip error and phase-flip error in logic-qubit entanglement can be well purified. Moreover, the bit-flip…
We show that single-photon entangled states of the form |0>|1>+|1>|0> can be purified with a simple linear-optics based protocol, which is eminently feasible with current technology. Besides its conceptual interest, this result is relevant for attractive quantum repeater protocols.
Quantum communication is a secure way to transfer quantum information and to communicate with legitimate parties over distant places in a network. Although communication over a long distance has already been attained, technical problem arises due to unavoidable loss of information through the transmission channel. Quantum repeaters can extend the distance scale using entanglement swapping and purification scheme. Here we demonstrate the working of a quantum repeater by the above two processes. We use IBM's real quantum processor `ibmqx4' to create two pair of entangled qubits and design an equ…
