Being able to implement effective entanglement distribution in noisy environments is a key step towards practical quantum communication, and long-term efforts have been made on the development of it. Recently, it has been found that the null-result weak measurement (NRWM) can be used to enhance probabilistically the entanglement of a single copy of amplitude-damped entangled state. This paper investigates remote distributions of bipartite and multipartite entangled states in the amplitudedamping environment by combining NRWMs and entanglement distillation protocols (EDPs). We show that the NRWM has no positive effect on the distribution of bipartite maximally entangled states and multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, although it is able to increase the amount of entanglement of each source state (noisy entangled state) of EDPs with a certain probability. However, we find that the NRWM would contribute to remote distributions of multipartite W states. We demonstrate that the NRWM can not only reduce the fidelity thresholds for distillability of decohered W states, but also raise the distillation efficiencies of W states. Our results suggest a new idea for quantifying the ability of a local filtering operation in protecting entanglement from decoherence.
Being able to implement effective entanglement distribution in noisy environments is a key step towards practical quantum communication, and long-term efforts have been made on the development of it. Recently, it has been found that the null-result weak measurement (NRWM) can be used to enhance probabilistically the entanglement of a single copy of amplitude-damped entangled state. This paper investigates remote distributions of bipartite and multipartite entangled states in the amplitudedamping environment by combining NRWMs and entanglement distillation protocols (EDPs). We show that the NRWM has no positive effect on the distribution of bipartite maximally entangled states and multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, although it is able to increase the amount of entanglement of each source state (noisy entangled state) of EDPs with a certain probability. However, we find that the NRWM would contribute to remote distributions of multipartite W states. We demonstrate that the NRWM can not only reduce the fidelity thresholds for distillability of decohered W states, but also raise the distillation efficiencies of W states. Our results suggest a new idea for quantifying the ability of a local filtering operation in protecting entanglement from decoherence.
In this work, we study how to distill two typical multipartite entangled noisy states, the amplitude-damped W state and the amplitude-damped Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. Unlike the currently existing multipartite entanglement purification schemes, our scheme is a single-copy-based scheme, i.e., only one noisy state is needed in each distillation round, and the complicated multilateral controlled-not (cnot) operations are replaced by measurements of local positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs). The results show that local POVM measurements on one copy of the noisy state can project the initial state onto a new state with higher entanglement and nonlocality. In this scheme, although the final state can violate the multipartite Bell inequality, the corresponding initial noisy state does not violate it, which means that this distillation scheme can reveal the hidden genuine multipartite nonlocality of these initial states. For the case of the amplitude-damped W state, if the POVM parameters are appropriately chosen, the fidelity of the output state can approach 1.0 for all the initial states with fidelity bigger than zero. So this single-copy-based multipartite entanglement distillation scheme has a wide range of distillable fidelities, and it is much simpler than the two-copy- or multiple-copy-based schemes. Furthermore, if the POVM measurement is carried out only on some member qubits rather than all of them, the distillation scheme can succeed too, which will greatly decrease the implementation complexity of the scheme. So this multipartite entanglement distillation scheme may be implementable in some physical system.
Entanglement is a vital resource for many quantum information processes. However, the unavoidable interaction between quantum system and its environment will lead to quantum decoherence. So protecting remote entanglement against decoherence is of great importance for realizing quantum information and quantum communication. In fact, there are many types of decoherences. Besides the depolarization and phase damping, amplitude damping is a typical decoherence mechanism. If we monitor the environments to guarantee that no excitation escapes from the system, the amplitude damping is modified into a weak measurement induced amplitude damping of the system. Amplitude damping decoherence can affect both single-qubit quantum states and multipartite entangled states. However, in most of previous quantum state protection schemes, the authors only pay attention to the single-qubit system or two-qubit system. Compared with bipartite entangled states, multipartite entangled states possess many advantages, but the entanglement property of multipartite entangled state is much more complicated than bipartite entanglement, so bipartite entanglement reversal (protection) scheme may not be suitable for multipartite case. Thus, in this paper, according to local pulse series and weak measurement, we propose an effective scheme for protecting two multipartite entangled states against amplitude damping, and these two multipartite states are Cluster state and Maximal slice (MS) state. Cluster state and MS state are two typical classes of multipartite entangled states, which play important roles in quantum computation and communication, respectively. These two states cannot be converted into each other with local operation and classical communication. Owing to its good operational and computable properties, here we choose negativity as a measure to quantify the multipartite entanglement. For the case of MS sate, no matter what the initial parameter is, when the local pulses are exerted on all qubits, the entanglement can be fixed around the entanglement of the initial state. Similarly, in the four-qubit cluster state case, if a series of flip operations is exerted on all qubits, it is shown that the multipartite entanglement can be recovered to the maximum 1.0. All these results show that this protocol can protect remote multipartite entanglement effectively. The physical mechanism behind this scheme is that the weak measurement combining with flip operation can balance the weight of different terms of the state, and move the entanglement toward the initial value. To summarize, our scheme is much simpler and feasible, which may warrant its experimental realization. Moreover, our scheme could be extended to protect other multipartite states.
Protection of entanglement from disturbance of the environment is an essential task in quantum information processing. We examine the validity and limitation of the weak measurement and reversal (WMR) operation in the protection of distributed entanglement from various decoherence sources. Since the entanglement variation can be investigated analytically for an arbitrarily entangled bipartite pure state under three kinds of typical noisy quantum channels, we show explicitly that the WMR operation indeed helps for protecting distributed entanglement from amplitude damping and phase damping, but not for depolarizing. Experimental feasibility for testing our results is discussed using current laboratory techniques.
This paper is to investigate the effects of quantum noises on entanglement localization by taking an example of reducing a three-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state to a two-qubit entangled state. We consider, respectively, two types of quantum decoherence, i.e., amplitude-damping and depolarizing decoherence, and explore the best von Neumann measurements on one of three qubits of the triple GHZ state for making the amount of entanglement of the collapsed bipartite state be as large as possible. The results indicate that different noises have different impacts on entanglement localization, and that the optimal strategy for reducing a three-qubit GHZ state to a two-qubit one via local measurements and classical communications in the amplitude-damping case is different from that in the noise-free case. We also show that the idea of entanglement localization could be utilized to improve the quality of bipartite entanglement distributing through amplitude-damping channels. These findings might shed a new light on entanglement manipulations and transformations.
Remote entanglement will inevitably decrease due to the interactions between quantum systems and their environments. Therefore protecting remote entanglement against decoherence is of great importance in realizing quantum communication and quantum comp utation. In this paper, we demonstrate that decoherence caused by weak-measurement-induced damping can be effectively suppressed by adding local unitary operation series on each qubit. The results show that the entanglement of the output state can approach that of the state before amplitude damping. The most distinct advantage of this entanglement protection scheme is that any unitary operation (except the identity operation) has this entanglement reversal effect on the amplitude-damped states. Furthermore, in each local unitary operation series, all the operations can be different from one other, and all the time intervals between any two adjacent operations can be different too. In addition, there is no need for the two remote users to synchronize their operations. Unlike most of the previous schemes, we do not assume the instantaneous local unitary operation, and each operation has a duration. All these advantages suggest that this remote entanglement protection scheme is much simpler and feasible than the previous ones, and we hope it can be implemented in the near future. Recently, Y. S. Kim et al. [Nat. Phys. 8, 117 (2012)] pointed out that ``pre-weak measurement + amplitude damping + bit-flipping operation + post-weak measurement'' can actively combat specific decoherence. By combing our proposal with Kim et al.'s scheme, the protection performance can be greatly improved by replacing the bit-flipping operation with an arbitrary rotational operation around the x axis, the number of the operations as well as the interval between any two adjacent operations all can be different, and the application range of the scheme can be greatly broadened.
The effect of quantum noise on entanglement localization is investigated. We show that the optimal strategy for reducing a multiparticle entangled state to a two-particle one via local measurements in the noise-free case is different from that in a noisy environment, and explore the best von Neumann measurement on one of three qubits of a triple Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state for extracting a two-qubit entangled state in the presence of local amplitude noises. We also demonstrate that the idea of entanglement localization can be utilized to improve the quality of bipartite entanglement distributing through noisy quantum channels. These results might shed a new light on entanglement manipulations and transformations.