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 transpose. It is shown, that reversibility occurs only in cases where the state is quasi-pure in the sense that all its pure state entanglement can be revealed by a simple operation on a single copy. The reversible cases are shown to be completely characterized by minimal uncertainty vectors for entropic uncertainty relations.
We show that the process of entanglement distillation is irreversible by showing that the entanglement cost of a bound entangled state is finite. Such irreversibility remains even if extra pure entanglement is loaned to assist the distillation process.
We relate the problem of irreversibility of entanglement with the recently defined measures of quantum correlation - quantum discord and one-way quantum deficit. We show that the entanglement of formation is always strictly larger than the coherent information and the entanglement cost is also larger in most cases. We prove irreversibility of entanglement under LOCC for a family of entangled states. This family is a generalization of the maximally correlated states for which we also give an analytic expression for the distillable entanglement, the relative entropy of entanglement, the distilla…
Previously proposed measures of entanglement, such as entanglement of formation and assistance, are shown to be special cases of the relative entropy of entanglement. The difference between these measures for an ensemble of mixed states is shown to depend on the availability of classical information about particular members of the ensemble. Based on this, relations between relative entropy of entanglement and mutual information are derived.
We demonstrate the irreversibility of asymptotic entanglement manipulation under quantum operations that completely preserve the positivity of partial transpose (PPT), resolving a major open problem in quantum information theory. Our key tool is a new efficiently computable additive lower bound for the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement with respect to PPT states, which can be used to evaluate the entanglement cost under local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We find that for any rank-two mixed state supporting on the $3\otimes3$ antisymmetric subspace, the amount of dis…
When a physical system is put in contact with a very large thermal bath, it undergoes a dissipative (i.e., an apparently irreversible) process that leads to thermal equilibrium. This dynamical process can be described fully within quantum physics, involving only unitary, therefore reversible, maps. The information, initially present in the system, is not erased, but is diluted in the bath because of entanglement. Irreversibility may arise if, after quantum information has been thus diluted, some classical information is lost. This paper reviews a model for thermalization that displays these fe…
We derive a new inequality for entanglement for a mixed four-partite state. Employing this inequality, we present a one-shot lower bound for entanglement cost and prove that entanglement cost is strictly larger than zero for any entangled state. We demonstrate that irreversibility occurs in the process of formation for all non-distillable entangled states. In this way we solve a long standing problem, of how "real" is entanglement of bound entangled states. Using the new inequality we also prove impossibility of local-cloning of a known entangled state.
For a pure state $ψ$ on a composite system $\mathcal{H}_A\otimes\mathcal{H}_B$, both the entanglement cost $E_C(ψ)$ and the distillable entanglement $E_D(ψ)$ coincide with the von Neumann entropy $H(\mathrm{Tr}_{B}ψ)$. Therefore, the entanglement concentration from the multiple state $ψ^{\otimes n}$ of a pure state $ψ$ to the multiple state $Φ^{\otimes L_n}$ of the EPR state $Φ$ seems to be able to be reversibly performed with an asymptotically infinitesimal error when the rate ${L_n}/{n}$ goes to $H(\mathrm{Tr}_{B}ψ)$. In this paper, we show that it is impossible to reversibly perform the ent…
The action of a channel on a quantum system, when non trivial, always causes deterioration of initial quantum resources, understood as the entanglement initially shared by the input system with some reference purifying it. One effective way to measure such a deterioration is by measuring the loss of coherent information, namely the difference between the initial coherent information and the final one: such a difference is ``small'', if and only if the action of the channel can be ``almost perfectly'' corrected with probability one. In this work, we generalise this result to different entanglem…
We show that in a quantum system evolving unitarily under a stochastic quantum circuit the notions of irreversibility, universality of computation, and entanglement are closely related. As the state evolves from an initial product state, it gets asymptotically maximally entangled. We define irreversibility as the failure of searching for a disentangling circuit using a Metropolis-like algorithm. We show that irreversibility corresponds to Wigner-Dyson statistics in the level spacing of the entanglement eigenvalues, and that this is obtained from a quantum circuit made from a set of universal g…
We study the problem of irreversibility when the dynamical evolution of a many-body system is described by a stochastic quantum circuit. Such evolution is more general than a Hamiltonian one, and since energy levels are not well defined, the well-established connection between the statistical fluctuations of the energy spectrum and irreversibility cannot be made. We show that the entanglement spectrum provides a more general connection. Irreversibility is marked by a failure of a disentangling algorithm and is preceded by the appearance of Wigner-Dyson statistical fluctuations in the entanglem…
We derive quantitative relations among several naturally defined measures of classical and nonclassical correlations in a bipartite quantum state. We also obtain an upper bound of entanglement irreversibility and a sufficient condition for reversible entanglement. The additivity of entanglement of formation is directly related to the additivity of quantum discord as well as a certain measure of classical correlation.
We investigate the asymptotic rates of entanglement transformations for bipartite mixed states by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We analyse the relations between the rates for different transitions and obtain simple lower and upper bound for these transitions. In a transition from one mixed state to another and back, the amount of irreversibility can be different for different target states. Thus in a natural way, we get the concept of "amount" of irreversibility in asymptotic manipulations of entanglement. We investigate the behaviour of these transformation rates for di…
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.
In quantum information theory, it is widely believed that entanglement concentration for bipartite pure states is asymptotically reversible. In order to examine this, we give a precise formulation of the problem, and show a trade-off relation between performance and reversibility, which implies the irreversibility of entanglement concentration. Then, we regard entanglement concentration as entangled state compression in an entanglement storage with lower dimension. Because of the irreversibility of entanglement concentration, an initial state can not be completely recovered after the compressi…
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.
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.
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 n…
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 …
