We introduce the concept of a physical process that purifies a mixed quantum state, taken from a set of states, and investigate the conditions under which such a purification map exists. Here, a purification of a mixed quantum state is a pure state in a higher-dimensional Hilbert space, the reduced density matrix of which is identical to the original state. We characterize all sets of mixed quantum states, for which perfect purification is possible. Surprisingly, some sets of two non-commuting states are among them. Furthermore, we investigate the possibility of performing an imperfect purification.
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 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 introduce a quantity called the coherence of purification which can be a measure of total quantumness for a single system. We prove that coherence of purification is always more than the coherence of the system. For a pure state, the coherence of purification is same as the relative entropy of coherence. Furthermore, we show that the difference in the coherence of purification of a quantum state before and after the dephasing can capture residual quantumness. In addition, we show that the entanglement of purification that can be created by incoherent operation between two subsystems is uppe…
We investigate the dynamics of quantum discord during the purification process. In the case of Werner states, it is shown that quantum discord is increased after a round of purification protocol. Furthermore, quantum mutual information and classical correlation is also increased during this process.Wealso give an analytic expression for a class of higher dimensional states which have additive quantum discord.
We prove that the quantum trajectory of repeated perfect measurement on a finite quantum system either asymptotically purifies, or hits upon a family of `dark' subspaces, where the time evolution is unitary.
A new purification scheme is proposed which applies to arbitrary dimensional bipartite quantum systems. It is based on the repeated application of a special class of nonlinear quantum maps and a single, local unitary operation. This special class of nonlinear quantum maps is generated in a natural way by a hermitian generalized XOR-gate. The proposed purification scheme offers two major advantages, namely it does not require local depolarization operations at each step of the purification procedure and it purifies more efficiently than other know purification schemes.
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.
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 …
Universal quantum state purification under energy-preserving constraints
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
We present a novel procedure to purify quantum states, i.e., purification through Zeno-like measurements. By simply repeating one and the same measurement on a quantum system, one can purify another system in interaction with the former. The conditions for the (efficient) purification are specified on a rather general setting, and the framework of the method possesses wide applicability. It is explicitly demonstrated on a specific setup that the purification becomes very efficient by tuning relevant parameters.
A generalization of the quantum XOR-gate is presented which operates in arbitrary dimensional Hilbert spaces. Together with one-particle Fourier transforms this gate is capable of performing a variety of tasks which are important for quantum information processing in arbitrary dimensional Hilbert spaces. Among these tasks are the preparation of Bell states, quantum teleportation and quantum state purification. A physical realization of this generalized XOR-gate is proposed which is based on non-linear optical elements.
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.
In this work we study the properties of an purification-based entropic metric for measuring the distance between both quantum states and quantum processes. This metric is defined as the square root of the entropy of the average of two purifications of mixed quantum states which maximize the overlap between the purified states. We analyze this metric and show that it satisfies many appealing properties, which suggest this metric is an interesting proposal for theoretical and experimental applications of quantum information.
Recently, Briegel et al. present a quantum repeaters protocol using nest entanglement purification for long distance quantum communication(Physical Review Letters \textbf{81},5932). In this paper we present a modified scheme for constructing an optimal quantum repeater using doubly entangled photon pairs that overcomes the limitations of quantum communication via noisy channels. Based on the imperfect quantum operations and classical communications, the polarization entangled quantum channels can be built with a better efficiency.
We analyze the estimation of a finite ensemble of quantum bits which have been sent through a depolarizing channel. Instead of using the depolarized qubits directly, we first apply a purification step and show that this improves the fidelity of subsequent quantum estimation. Even though we lose some qubits of our finite ensemble the information is concentrated in the remaining purified ones.
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.
Pure states are fundamental for the implementation of quantum technologies, and several methods for the purification of the state of a quantum system S have been developed in the past years. In this letter we present a new approach, based on the interaction of S with an auxiliary system P, having a wide range of applicability. Considering two-level systems S and P and assuming a particular interaction between them, we prove that complete purifications can be obtained under suitable conditions on the parameters characterizing P. Using analytical and numerical tools, we show that the purificatio…
Hyperentanglement is a promising resource in quantum information processing, especially for increasing the channel capacity of long-distance quantum communication. Hyperentanglement purification is an important method to obtain high-fidelity nonlocal hyperentangled states from mixed hyperentangled states in a long-distance quantum communication process with noisy channels. Here, we present a two-step hyperentanglement purification protocol for nonlocal mixed hyperentangled states with polarization bit-flip errors and spatial-mode phase-flip errors, resorting to polarization-spatial phase-check…
The distribution of entangled states between distant locations will be essential for the future large scale realization of quantum communication schemes such as quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. Because of the unavoidable noise in the quantum communication channel, the entanglement between two particles is more and more degraded the further they propagate. Entanglement purification is thus essential to distill highly entangled states from less entangled ones. Existing general purification protocols are based on the quantum controlled-NOT (CNOT) or similar quantum logic operations…
Quantum error mitigation is essential for computing on the noisy quantum computer with a limited number of qubits. In this paper, we propose a practical protocol of error mitigation by virtually purifying the quantum state without qubit overhead or requiring only one ancillary qubit. In dual-state purification, we effectively generate a purified state with increased fidelity using the erroneous state and its dual state, respectively, prepared with the noisy quantum circuit and the dual map of its inverse circuit. Combined with tomography purification, we can make sure that the final estimate o…
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…
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.
Power and limitations of distributed quantum state purification
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics（理论物理前沿研究所）
We study the stability under quantum noise effects of the quantum privacy amplification protocol for the purification of entanglement in quantum cryptography. We assume that the E91 protocol is used by two communicating parties (Alice and Bob) and that the eavesdropper Eve uses the isotropic Bužek-Hillery quantum copying machine to extract information. Entanglement purification is then operated by Alice and Bob by means of the quantum privacy amplification protocol and we present a systematic numerical study of the impact of all possible single-qubit noise channels on this protocol. We find th…
We present a nondestructive parity-check detector (PCD) scheme for two single-electron quantum dots embedded in double-sided optical microcavities. Using a polarization-entangled photon pair, the PCD works in a parallel style and is robust to the phase fluctuation of the optical path length. In addition, we present an economic entanglement purification protocol for electron pairs with our nondestructive PCD. The parties in quantum communication can increase the purification efficiency and simultaneously decrease the quantum source consumed for some particular fidelity thresholds. Therefore, ou…
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.
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…
We present an approach to purification and entanglement routing on complex quantum network architectures, that is, how a quantum network equipped with imperfect channel fidelities and limited memory storage time can distribute entanglement between users. We explore how network parameters influence the performance of path-finding algorithms necessary for optimizing routing and, in particular, we explore the interplay between the bandwidth of a quantum channels and the choice of purification protocol. Finally, we demonstrate multi-path routing on various network topologies with resource constrai…
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 …
To achieve the practical applications of near-term noisy quantum devices, low-cost ways to mitigate the noise damages in the devices are essential. In many applications, the noiseless state we want to prepare is often a pure state, which has recently inspired a range of purification-based quantum error mitigation proposals. The existing proposals either are limited to the suppressions of only the leading-order state preparation errors, or require a large number of long-range gates that might be challenging to implement depending on the qubit architecture. This article will provide an overview …
The entanglement resource required for quantum information processing comes in a variety of forms, from Bell states to multipartite GHZ states or cluster states. Purifying these resources after their imperfect generation is an indispensable step towards using them in quantum architectures. While this challenge, both in the case of Bell pairs and more general multipartite entangled states, is mostly overcome in the presence of perfect local quantum hardware with unconstrained qubit register sizes, devising optimal purification strategies for finite-size realistic noisy hardware has remained elu…
Quantum-limited amplifiers increase the amplitude of quantum signals at the price of introducing additional noise. Quantum purification protocols operate in the reverse way, by reducing the noise while attenuating the signal. Here we investigate a scenario that interpolates between these two extremes. We search for the optimal physical process that generates $M$ approximate copies of pure and amplified coherent state, starting from $N$ copies of a noisy coherent state with Gaussian modulation. We prove that the optimal deterministic processes are always Gaussian, whereas non-Gaussianity powers…
High-fidelity quantum entanglement is a key resource for quantum communication and distributed quantum computing, enabling quantum state teleportation, dense coding, and quantum encryption. Any sources of decoherence in the communication channel however degrade entanglement fidelity, thereby increasing the error rates of entangled state protocols. Entanglement purification provides a method to alleviate these non-idealities, by distilling impure states into higher-fidelity entangled states. Here we demonstrate the entanglement purification of Bell pairs shared between two remote superconductin…
We consider the problem of improving noisy quantum measurements by suitable preprocessing strategies making many noisy detectors equivalent to a single ideal detector. For observables pertaining to finite-dimensional systems (e.g. qubits or spins) we consider preprocessing strategies that are reminiscent of quantum error correction procedures and allows one to perfectly measure an observable on a single quantum system for increasing number of inefficient detectors. For measurements of observables with unbounded spectrum (e.g. photon number, homodyne and heterodyne detection), the purification …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie（柏林亥姆霍兹材料与能源中心）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
We investigate the probabilistic cloning and purification of quantum states. The performance of these probabilistic operations is quantified by the average fidelity between the ideal and actual output states. We provide a simple formula for the maximal achievable average fidelity and we explictly show how to construct a probabilistic operation that achieves this fidelity. We illustrate our method on several examples such as the phase covariant cloning of qubits, cloning of coherent states, and purification of qubits transmitted via depolarizing channel and amplitude damping channel. Our exampl…
We present a protocol based on continuous-variable quantum teleportation and Gaussian post- selection that can be used to correct errors introduced by a lossy channel. We first show that the global transformation enacted by the protocol is equivalent to an effective system composed of a noiseless amplification (or attenuation), and an effective quantum channel, which can in theory have no loss and an amount of thermal noise arbitrarily small, hence tending to an identity channel. An application of our protocol is the probabilistic purification of quantum non-Gaussian states using only Gaussian…
A scheme of three-particle entanglement purification is presented in this work. The physical system undertaken for investigation is dot-like single quantum well excitons independently coupled through a single microcavity mode. The theoretical framework for the proposed scheme is based on the quantum jump approach for analyzing the progress of the trible-exciton entanglement as a series of conditional measurement has been taken on the cavity field state. We first investigate how cavity photon affects the purity of the double-exciton state and the purification efficiency in two-particle protocol…
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…
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…
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.
Preparing a quantum system in a pure state is ultimately limited by the nature of the system's evolution in the presence of its environment and by the initial state of the environment itself. We show that, when the system and environment are initially uncorrelated and arbitrary joint unitary dynamics is allowed, the system may be purified up to a certain (possibly arbitrarily small) threshold if and only if its environment, either natural or engineered, contains a "virtual subsystem" which has the same dimension and is in a state with the desired purity. Beside providing a unified understandin…
Single photon emitters are indispensable to photonic quantum technologies. Here we demonstrate waveform-controlled high-purity single photons from room-temperature colloidal quantum dots. The purity of the single photons does not vary with the excitation power, thereby allowing the generation rate to be increased without compromising the single-photon quality.
The manipulation of quantum coherence is one of the principal issues in the resource theory of coherence, with two critical topics being the purification and enhancement of coherence. Here, we present two no-go theorems for the deterministic purification of coherence and the probabilistic enhancement of coherence, respectively. Specifically, we prove that a quantum state cannot be deterministically purified if it can be expressed as a convex combination of an incoherent state and a coherent state. Besides, we give an easy-to-verified sufficient and necessary condition to determine whether a st…
A geometric Fano--Procrustes framework for purification-based distances and quantum channels analysis
Instituto de Física Enrique Gaviola (IFEG-UNC-CONICET), Universidad Nacional de Córdoba（恩里克·加维亚多物理研究所（IFEG-UNC-CONICET），科尔多瓦国立大学）；Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía, Física y Computación（科尔多瓦国立大学。数学、天文学、物理与计算学院）
It has been recently shown that there exist universal fundamental limits to the accuracy and efficiency of the transformation from noisy resource states to pure ones (e.g.,~distillation) in any well-behaved quantum resource theory [Fang/Liu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 060405 (2020)]. Here, we develop a novel and powerful method for analyzing the limitations on quantum resource purification, which not only leads to improved bounds that rule out exact purification for a broader range of noisy states and are tight in certain cases, but also enable us to establish a robust no-purification theory for qu…
