High-fidelity entanglement shared between distant quantum systems is an essential resource for quantum communication and computation. Entanglement distillation addresses this need by converting multiple noisy Bell pairs into fewer higher-fidelity pairs, using only local quantum operations and classical communication. However, this approach typically requires a substantial overhead in the number of qubits. To bypass this hurdle, we propose to leverage the high-dimensional Hilbert space of a single pair of bosonic systems to store a large amount of entanglement, replacing the need for multi-qubit systems. To distill entanglement in such a setup, we devise a new entanglement distillation protocol, tailored for bosonic systems. The protocol converts a highly-entangled noisy state between two bosonic systems into a lower-dimensional but high-fidelity entangled state, using only local bosonic operations. We show that our protocol significantly enhances the fidelity of the entangled state in the presence of naturally occurring loss and dephasing errors. Compared to methods relying on multiple Bell pairs, our scheme offers a more hardware-efficient strategy, providing a practical route toward the realization of entanglement distillation.
Efficient entanglement distillation is a central task in quantum information science and future quantum networks. At the core of distillation protocols are the quantum error correction and detection schemes which enhance the fidelity of entangled pairs. Conventional protocols focus on digital systems, which typically require complicated compiled circuits, high-fidelity multi-qubit operations and delicate pulse-level control that impose high demands on near-term hardware. Crucially, the leading physical platforms for quantum networks, trapped ions and neutral atoms, are governed by native many-body Hamiltonians inherently suited for analog, continuous-time evolution. Adopting these natural dynamics is simpler than engineering digital logic via delicate pulse-level control. Motivated by this experimental reality, we seek to leverage the intrinsic analog capabilities for efficient entanglement distillation. In this work, we introduce the Hamiltonian entanglement distillation protocol, which exploits the intrinsic information scrambling generated by random time evolution under native Hamiltonians. We establish a quantitative connection between output fidelity and Out-of-Time-Order Correlators, showing that efficient scrambling directly implies good distillation performance. Since generic Hamiltonians are naturally efficient scramblers, the capability for distillation is ubiquitous: almost all Hamiltonians in the Hilbert space suffice for high-fidelity distillation. Numerical simulations of representative Rydberg-atom and trapped-ion systems further confirm that robust performance could be achieved using only short-range interactions and evolution times feasible in current experiments. By avoiding the complexity of digital circuit control, our approach substantially relaxes experimental requirements, providing a scalable route to entanglement engineering on current analog quantum platforms.
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 trade-off between the fidelity to the target state and the probability of successful distillation. Exploiting such trade-offs 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 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.
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.
Magic state distillation is a crucial yet resource-intensive process in fault-tolerant quantum computation. The protocol's overhead, defined as the number of input magic states required per output magic state with an error rate below
ε, typically grows as
O(logγ(1/ε)). Achieving smaller overheads, i.e., smaller exponents
γ, is highly desirable; however, all existing protocols require polylogarithmically growing overheads with some
γ>0, and identifying the smallest achievable exponent
γ for distilling magic states of qubits has remained challenging. To address this issue, we develop magic state distillation protocols for qubits with efficient, polynomial-time decoding that achieve an
O(1) overhead, meaning the optimal exponent
γ=0; this improves over the previous best of
γ≈0.678 due to Hastings and Haah. In our construction, we employ algebraic geometry codes to explicitly present asymptotically good quantum codes for
210-dimensional qudits that support transversally implementable logical gates in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy. The use of asymptotically good codes with non-vanishing rate and relative distance leads to the constant overhead. These codes can be realised by representing each
210-dimensional qudit as a set of
10 qubits, using stabiliser operations on qubits. The
10-qubit magic states distilled with these codes can be converted to and from conventional magic states for the controlled-controlled-
Z (
CCZ) and
T gates on qubits with only a constant overhead loss, making it possible to achieve constant-overhead distillation of such standard magic states for qubits. These results resolve the fundamental open problem in quantum information theory concerning the construction of magic state distillation protocols with the optimal exponent.
Entanglement is essential for quantum information processing, but is limited by noise. We address this by developing high-yield entanglement distillation protocols with several advancements. (1) We extend the 2-to-1 recurrence entanglement distillation protocol to higher-rate n -to- ( n − 1 ) protocols that can correct any single-qubit errors. These protocols are evaluated through numerical simulations focusing on fidelity and yield. We also outline a method to adapt any classical error-correcting code for entanglement distillation, where the code can correct both bit-flip and phase-flip errors by incorporating Hadamard gates. (2) We propose a constant-depth decoder for stabilizer codes that transforms logical states into physical ones using single-qubit measurements. This decoder is applied to entanglement distillation protocols, reducing circuit depth and enabling protocols derived from high-performance quantum error-correcting codes. We demonstrate this by evaluating the circuit complexity for entanglement distillation protocols based on surface codes and quantum convolutional codes. (3) Our stabilizer entanglement distillation techniques advance quantum computing. We propose a fault-tolerant protocol for constant-depth encoding and decoding of arbitrary states in surface codes, with potential extensions to more general quantum low-density parity-check codes. This protocol is feasible with state-of-the-art reconfigurable atom arrays and surpasses the limits of conventional logarithmic depth encoders. Overall, our study integrates stabilizer formalism, measurement-based quantum computing, and entanglement distillation, advancing both quantum communication and computing.