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arXiv:1401.5670 · Physical Review A

Entanglement purification with the exchange interaction

Adrian Auer, Guido Burkard

Published Aug 20, 2014• 1 citation
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Abstract

Entanglement purification allows the creation of qubit pairs of arbitrarily high fidelity with respect to a maximally entangled state, starting from a larger number of low-fidelity pairs. Purification requires quantum memory, a role for which electron spins are well suited. However, using existing recurrence protocols involving symmetric local two-qubit operations for spin qubits turns out to be rather unpractical. We present an efficient purification protocol requiring only a single pulsed Heisenberg- or XY-type exchange interaction between two qubit pairs. In contrast to known protocols, we allow for asymmetric bilateral two-qubit operations where the two communication parties operate differently on their qubits. In the optimal version of our protocol, the local two-qubit interactions in the case of Heisenberg exchange correspond to the $\sqrt{swap}$ gate and its inverse.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.90.022320

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Entanglement purification allows the creation of qubit pairs of arbitrarily high fidelity with respect to a maximally entangled state, starting from a larger number of low-fidelity pairs. Purification requires quantum memory, a role for which electron spins are well suited. However, using existing recurrence protocols involving symmetric local two-qubit operations for spin qubits turns out to be rather unpractical. We present an efficient purification protocol requiring only a single pulsed Heisenberg- or XY-type exchange interaction between two qubit pairs. In contrast to known protocols, we allow for asymmetric bilateral two-qubit operations where the two communication parties operate differently on their qubits. In the optimal version of our protocol, the local two-qubit interactions in the case of Heisenberg exchange correspond to the swap\sqrt{swap}swap​ gate and its inverse.
Entanglement distillation, a fundamental building block of quantum networks, enables the purification of noisy entangled states shared among distant nodes by local operations and classical communication. Its practical realization presents several technical challenges, including the storage of quantum states in quantum memory and the execution of coherent quantum operations on multiple copies of states within the quantum memory. In this work, we present an entanglement purification protocol via quantum communication, namely a carrier-assisted entanglement purification protocol, which utilizes two elements only: i) quantum memory for a single-copy entangled state shared by parties and ii) single qubits travelling between parties. We show that the protocol, when single-qubit transmission is noiseless, can purify a noisy entangled state shared by parties. When single-qubit transmission is noisy, the purification relies on types of noisy qubit channels; we characterize Pauli channels such that the protocol works for the purification. We address this limitation by using multiple carrier qubits, and show that for any non-entanglement-breaking Pauli channel, the protocol's fixed-point fidelity approaches unity as the number of carriers increases. Our results significantly reduce the experimental overhead required for distilling entanglement: the practical advantage is demonstrated through parameters directly related to the capability of entanglement purification, such as noise in quantum memory, local measurements, channel use, and entanglement fidelity. We envisage that the protocol would make long-distance pure entanglement closer to a practical realization.
Bipartite entanglement purification is the conversion of copies of weakly entangled pairs shared between two separated parties into a smaller number of strongly entangled shared pairs using only local operations and classical communication. Choosing between different entanglement purification protocols generally involves weighing up a trade-off between the ratio of strongly entangled pairs produced to weakly entangled pairs consumed, which we call the rate of the protocol, and the degree of the entanglement of the strongly entangled pairs, typically measured by the fidelity of those pairs to maximally entangled states. By randomly choosing a protocol according to a probability distribution over a list of protocols for each pair we want to produce, we can achieve rates and fidelities not achieved by any of the original protocols. Here, we show how to choose this distribution to maximize the rate at which we produce qubit pairs with a given fidelity to a Bell state or, equivalently, to maximize the fidelity to a Bell state of the qubit pairs produced at a given rate. We investigate both the asymptotic case, where the number of initial pairs goes to infinity, and the finite-size regime, where protocols are restricted to a finite number of weakly entangled pairs.
We present the convergence study of a recurrence entanglement purification protocol using arbitrary two-qubit initial states. The protocol is based on a rank 2 projector in the Bell basis which serves as a two-qubit operation replacing the usual controlled-not gate. We show that the whole space of two-qubit density matrices is mapped onto an invariant subspace characterized by seven real parameters. By analyzing this type of density matrices we are able to find general conditions for entanglement purification in the form of two inequalities between pairs of diagonal elements and pairs of coherences. We show that purifiable initial states do not necessary require a fidelity larger than one half with respect to any maximally entangled pure state. Furthermore, we find a family of states parametrized by their concurrence that can be perfectly converted into a Bell state in just one step of the protocol with probability proportional to the square of the concurrence.
We propose an entanglement purification scheme based on material qubits and ancillary coherent multiphoton states. We consider a typical QED scenario where material qubits implemented by two-level atoms fly sequentially through a cavity and interact resonantly with a single mode of the radiation field. We explore the theoretical possibilities of realizing a high-fidelity two-qubit quantum operation necessary for the purification protocol with the help of a postselective balanced homodyne photodetection. We demonstrate that the obtained probabilistic quantum operation can be used as a bilateral operation in the proposed purification scheme. It is shown that the probabilistic nature of this quantum operation is counterbalanced in the last step of the scheme where qubits are not discarded after inadequate qubit measurements. As this protocol requires present-day experimental setups and generates high-fidelity entangled pairs with high repetition rates, it may offer interesting perspectives for applications in quantum information theory.
Locally maximally entangleable states (LMESs) constitute a large set of multipartite states, containing, for instance, all stabilizer states. LMESs are uniquely characterized by $({2}^{n}\ensuremath{-}1)$ phases, where nnn denotes the number of qubits. We consider here those LMESs whose phases are either 0 or $\ensuremath{\pi}$ and present a multipartite entanglement purification protocol for arbitrary such states. In contrast to all previously known recurrence protocols, this protocol uses a different ingredient, which is required due to the quantum correlations contained in the various LMESs. We compare this scheme to previously known entanglement purification protocols and show that the direct purification performs better than previously known protocols.
Entanglement purification describes a primitive in quantum information processing, where several copies of noisy quantum states are distilled into a few copies of nearly pure states of high quality via local operations and classical communication. Especially in the multiparticle case, the task of entanglement purification is complicated, as many inequivalent forms of pure state entanglement exist and purification protocols need to be tailored for different target states. In this paper we present optimized protocols for the purification of hypergraph states, which form a family of multiqubit states that are relevant from several perspectives. We start by reformulating an existing purification protocol in a graphical language. This allows for systematical optimization and we present improvements in three directions. First, one can optimize the sequences of the protocol with respect to the ordering of the parties. Second, one can use adaptive schemes, where the measurement results obtained within the protocol are used to modify the protocols. Finally, one can improve the protocol with respect to the efficiency, requiring fewer copies of noisy states to reach a certain target state.