Abstract We consider entanglement distillation with noisy operations in which quantum measurements that constitute a general quantum operation are particularly noisy. We present a protocol for purifying noisy measurements and show that imperfect local operations can distill entanglement. The protocol works for arbitrary noisy measurements in general and is cost-effective and resource-efficient with single additional qubit per party to resolve the distillation of entanglement. The purification protocol is feasible with currently available quantum technologies and readily applied to entanglement applications.
Abstract We consider entanglement distillation with noisy operations in which quantum measurements that constitute a general quantum operation are particularly noisy. We present a protocol for purifying noisy measurements and show that imperfect local operations can distill entanglement. The protocol works for arbitrary noisy measurements in general and is cost-effective and resource-efficient with single additional qubit per party to resolve the distillation of entanglement. The purification protocol is feasible with currently available quantum technologies and readily applied to entanglement applications.
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.
The entangled coherent states (ECSs) have been widely used to realize quantum information processing tasks. However, the ECSs may suffer from photon loss and decoherence due to the inherent noise in quantum channel, which may degrade the fidelity of ECSs. To overcome these obstacles, we present a measurement-based entanglement purification protocol (MBEPP) for ECSs to distill some high-quality ECSs from a large number of low-quality copies. We first show the principle of this MBEPP without considering the photon loss. After that, we prove that this MBEPP is feasible to correct the error resulted from the photon loss. Additionally, this MBEPP only requires to operate the Bell state measurement without performing local two-qubit gates on the noisy pairs and the purified high-quality ECSs can be preserved for other applications. This MBEPP may have application potential in the implementation of long-distance quantum communication.
Near-term and early fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures are expected to exhibit highly non-uniform error rates. In particular, local operations within a chip can be substantially more reliable than operations connecting different chips or dilution refrigerators. Such inter-module operations can therefore become a dominant bottleneck, even when quantum error correction is applied. Entanglement distillation provides a natural way to trade additional operations and qubits for higher-fidelity entanglement. Standard distillation protocols, however, are usually formulated in an LOCC resource model, in which several noisy Bell pairs are generated initially and all subsequent processing consists only of local operations and classical communication. Here, we consider a generalized model tailored to modular quantum computing hardware, in which the two modules have access to high-fidelity local operations and to repeated uses of the same noisy inter-module entangling operation during the protocol. We develop practical small-scale entanglement distillation protocols designed to minimize both space and time overhead. Remarkably, our main protocol requires only two qubits per module, yet achieves quadratic error suppression of inter-module errors, assuming local operations are much cleaner. Compared with existing small-scale protocols, our space-optimal protocol provides more space- and time-efficient quadratic error suppression and achieves the best performance in our simulations and experiments on noisy links of current superconducting quantum processors. These results suggest that inter-module-gate-assisted entanglement distillation can be a practical primitive for overcoming noisy links in modular quantum computing architectures.
Abstract In quantum metrology, the precision of unknown parameter estimation is studied in the quantum regime, and the choice of the probe state plays an important role in determining the precision of the parameter to be estimated. The quality of quantum metrology will be reduced in the presence of quantum noise during the memory time of probe states after preparation. Meanwhile the noisy probe state can be manipulated by different protocols such as single‐qubit purification, entanglement purification, and entanglement distillation etc. In this paper, the effects of these manipulations on the usefulness, that is, quantum Fisher information (QFI), of the noisy probe state in quantum metrology are studied. The results show that joint operations in single‐qubit purification and entanglement purification processes play positive roles in enhancing the QFI of the probe states, and local measurements in entanglement purification and entanglement distillation processes play both positive and negative roles in enhancing the QFI of the probe states. In this sense, single‐qubit purification will always be helpful in parameter estimation by using single qubits as probe, and entanglement purification process maybe more suitable for improving the estimation precision when entangled‐state probe is adopted.
Distillation, or purification, is central to the practical use of quantum resources in noisy settings often encountered in quantum communication and computation. Conventionally, distillation requires using some restricted "free" operations to convert a noisy state into one that approximates a desired pure state. Here, we propose to relax this setting by only requiring the approximation of the measurement statistics of a target pure state, which allows for additional classical postprocessing of the measurement outcomes. We show that this extended scenario, which we call "virtual resource distillation," provides considerable advantages over standard notions of distillation, allowing for the purification of noisy states from which no resources can be distilled conventionally. We show that general states can be virtually distilled with a cost (measurement overhead) that is inversely proportional to the amount of existing resource, and we develop methods to efficiently estimate such cost via convex and semidefinite programming, giving several computable bounds. We consider applications to coherence, entanglement, and magic distillation, and an explicit example in quantum teleportation (distributed quantum computing). This work opens a new avenue for investigating generalized ways to manipulate quantum resources.
Entanglement purification protocols are fundamental primitives in quantum communication, enabling the distillation of high-quality entanglement using only local operations and classical communication. For large multipartite states, however, existing purification schemes typically require substantial resources and become progressively inefficient as system size increases. We introduce a new type of multipartite entanglement purification, Localized Entanglement Purification (LEP), a family of protocols that purify entanglement at the level of network regions rather than globally. By exploiting spatial noise asymmetries, LEP reduces resource consumption and enables scalable purification strategies for larger quantum systems.