Amending entanglement-breaking channels via intermediate unitary operations
Álvaro Cuevas, Antonella De Pasquale, Andrea Mari, Adeline Orieux, Stefano Duranti, M. Massaro, Andrea Di Carli, Emanuele Roccia, José Ferraz, Fabio Sciarrino, Paolo Mataloni, Vittorio Giovannetti
We report a bulk optics experiment demonstrating the possibility of restoring the entanglement distribution through noisy quantum channels by inserting a suitable unitary operation (filter) in the middle of the transmission process. We focus on two relevant classes of single-qubit channels consisting in repeated applications of rotated phase-damping or rotated amplitude-damping maps, both modeling the combined Hamiltonian and dissipative dynamics of the polarization state of single photons. Our results show that interposing a unitary filter between two noisy channels can significantly improve entanglement transmission. This proof-of-principle demonstration could be generalized to many other physical scenarios where entanglement-breaking communication lines may be amended by unitary filters.
We report a bulk optics experiment demonstrating the possibility of restoring the entanglement distribution through noisy quantum channels by inserting a suitable unitary operation (filter) in the middle of the transmission process. We focus on two relevant classes of single-qubit channels consisting in repeated applications of rotated phase-damping or rotated amplitude-damping maps, both modeling the combined Hamiltonian and dissipative dynamics of the polarization state of single photons. Our results show that interposing a unitary filter between two noisy channels can significantly improve entanglement transmission. This proof-of-principle demonstration could be generalized to many other physical scenarios where entanglement-breaking communication lines may be amended by unitary filters.
We show that there exist Gaussian channels which are amendable. A channel that is entanglement-breaking of order 2 [A. De Pasquale and V. Giovannetti, Phys. Rev. A 86, 052302 (2012)] is amendable if there exists an unitary filter that, once applied in between two actions of the channel, removes the entanglement-breaking property of the overall transformation. We find that, depending on the structure of the channel, the unitary filter can be a squeezing transformation or a phase-shift operation. We also propose two realistic quantum optics experiments where the amendability of Gaussian channels can be verified by exploiting the fact that it is sufficient to test the entanglement-breaking properties of two-mode Gaussian channels on input states with finite energy (which are not maximally entangled).
We study a set of new functionals (called entanglement–breaking indices) which characterize how many local iterations of a given (local) quantum channel are needed in order to completely destroy the entanglement between the system of interest over which the transformation is defined and an external ancilla. The possibility of contrasting the noisy effects introduced by the channel iterations via the action of intermediate (filtering) transformations is analyzed. We provide some examples in which our functionals can be exactly calculated. The differences between unitary and non-unitary filtering operations are analyzed showing that, at least for systems of dimension d larger than or equal to 3, the non-unitary choice is preferable (the gap between the performances of the two cases being divergent in some cases). For d = 2 (qubit case), on the contrary, no evidences of the presence of such gap is revealed: we conjecture that for this special case unitary filtering transformations are optimal. The scenario in which more general filtering protocols are allowed is also discussed in some detail. The case of a depolarizing noise acting on a two–qubit system is exactly solved in a general case.
We propose a scheme to enhance entanglement from amplitude damping or correlated amplitude damping decoherence. We show that entanglement sudden death time can be prolonged by the initial single-qubit operation combined with local filtering operation. For the amplitude damping channel case, we give the optimal single-qubit operation for arbitrary pure state [Formula: see text]. For the correlated amplitude damping channel case, we find that single-qubit operation on the initial state can not only enhance the final entanglement but also avoid entanglement sudden death. Compared to the previous schemes, the optimal operations and local filtering operations used in our scheme are independent with the decay parameters of the environment.
The distribution of entangled quantum systems among two or more nodes of a network is a key task at the basis of quantum communication, quantum computation, and quantum cryptography. Unfortunately, the transmission lines used in this procedure can introduce so many perturbations and so much noise in the transmitted signal that they prevent the possibility of restoring quantum correlations in the received messages either by means of encoding optimization or by exploiting local operations and classical communication. In this work we present a procedure which allows one to improve the performance of some of these channels. The mechanism underpinning this result is a protocol which we dub cut and paste, as it consists in extracting and reshuffling the subcomponents of these communication lines, which finally succeed in correcting each other. The proof of this counterintuitive phenomenon, while improving our theoretical understanding of quantum entanglement, also has a direct application in the realization of quantum information networks based on imperfect and highly noisy communication lines. A quantum optics experiment, based on the transmission of single-photon polarization states, is also presented which provides a proof-of-principle test of the proposed protocol.
We investigate the change of entanglement for distributing an arbitrarily entangled two-qubit pure state via three typical kinds of noisy quantum channels—amplitude damping, phase damping and depolarizing quantum channels. We find that for one-qubit transmission, the output distant entanglement (measured by concurrence) reduces proportionately with respect to its initial amount, and the entanglement-decay ratio is determined only by the noisy characteristics of quantum channels. For two-qubit transmission, the rule of the entanglement change is complex. For phase damping quantum channels, the four Bell states and are all the optimal entanglement-distribution (OED) input states. But for amplitude damping quantum channels, only |ψ ± ⟩ are the OED input. For depolarizing quantum channels, and in the case of symmetrical quantum channels, the four Bell states are still the OED input. We also discuss the problem of entanglement sudden death (ESD) and find that for all the three types of quantum channels, ESD can be found.
We systematically characterize quantum entanglement in all sixteen combinations of two-qubit Bell states across three operational regimes: pure superposition, noiseless mixing, and asymmetric mixing of one noisy and one pure Bell state. For pure superpositions, we calculate the von Neumann entropy and show that entanglement depends critically on the relative phase phi between superposed states. For mixed states, we use concurrence C under three physically motivated decoherence channels. The Depolarizing (DP) and Phase Damping (PD) channels are modeled as global, collective operations on the two-qubit Hilbert space, while Amplitude Damping (AD) is treated as independent local decay on each qubit, reflecting the asymmetric, energy-dissipating nature of spontaneous emission. A central and counterintuitive result is that increasing noise can raise concurrence in specific parameter regimes across all three channels. We further map the boundary between mathematical entanglement (C > 0) and operational quantum non-locality using the Horodecki criterion, finding this boundary to be strongly channel-dependent. Under Phase Damping, the Bell-local entanglement regime vanishes entirely for identical and same-bases mixtures, meaning any surviving entanglement guarantees a CHSH violation. Under Depolarizing noise, a large Bell-local region requires mixing probability r > 1/sqrt(2) to recover non-locality at maximum noise. For Amplitude Damping, certain mixtures exhibit a non-monotonic Horodecki parameter M(T): concurrence decreases monotonically with noise, yet the capacity for CHSH violation is lost at intermediate noise levels and restored at high noise, as maximal damping repurifies the noisy branch. These results provide a unified analytical reference for entanglement and non-locality management across Bell-state combinations and decoherence channels relevant to NISQ architectures.