No Arabic abstract
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 are optimizing the tradeoff between the fidelity increase and the probability of a successful run.
Plasmonics is a rapidly emerging platform for quantum state engineering with the potential for building ultra-compact and hybrid optoelectronic devices. Recent experiments have shown that despite the presence of decoherence and loss, photon statistics and entanglement can be preserved in single plasmonic systems. This preserving ability should carry over to plasmonic metamaterials, whose properties are the result of many individual plasmonic systems acting collectively, and can be used to engineer optical states of light. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of quantum state filtering, also known as entanglement distillation, using a metamaterial. We show that the metamaterial can be used to distill highly entangled states from less entangled states. As the metamaterial can be integrated with other optical components this work opens up the intriguing possibility of incorporating plasmonic metamaterials in on-chip quantum state engineering tasks.
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 success. We show that this method performs well for many known examples by comparing it to well-known distillation protocols. This allows us to show optimality for many well-known distillation protocols for specific states of interest. As an example, we analytically prove optimality of the distillation protocol utilized within the Extreme Photon Loss (EPL) entanglement generation scheme, even in the asymptotic limit. We proceed to present a numerical method that can improve an existing distillation scheme for a given input state, and we present an example for which this method finds an optimal distillation protocol. An implementation of our numerical methods is available as a Julia package.
The phenomenon of quantum entanglement marks one of the furthest departures from classical physics and is indispensable for quantum information processing. Despite its fundamental importance, the distribution of entanglement over long distances trough photons is unfortunately hindered by unavoidable decoherence effects. Entanglement distillation is a means of restoring the quality of such diluted entanglement by concentrating it into a pair of qubits. Conventionally, this would be done by distributing multiple photon pairs and distilling the entanglement into a single pair. Here, we turn around this paradigm by utilising pairs of single photons entangled in multiple degrees of freedom. Specifically, we make use of the polarisation and the energy-time domain of photons, both of which are extensively field-tested. We experimentally chart the domain of distillable states and achieve relative fidelity gains up to 13.8 %. Compared to the two-copy scheme, the distillation rate of our single-copy scheme is several orders of magnitude higher, paving the way towards high-capacity and noise-resilient quantum networks.
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 probability of the distillation protocol, we show that the logarithmic negativity surpasses the bound on deterministic entanglement distribution at a relatively large probability of success. This is in contrast to the other measures which would only be able to do so at much lower probabilities, hence demonstrating that logarithmic negativity alone is inadequate for assessing the performance of the distillation protocol. In addition to this result, we also observed an increase in the distillable entanglement by making use of upper and lower bounds to estimate this quantity. We thus demonstrate the utility of these theoretical tools in an experimental setting.
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.