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arXiv:2509.07514 · IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

Carrier-Assisted Entanglement Purification

Jaemin Kim, Karthik Mohan, Sung Won Yun, Joonwoo Bae

Published Jan 1, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

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.

DOI: 10.1109/jsac.2026.3710152

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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.

Abstract Quantum communication enables secure information transmission and entanglement distribution, but these tasks are fundamentally limited by the capacities of quantum channels. While quantum repeaters can mitigate losses and noise, entanglement swapping via a central node is ineffective against the Pauli dephasing channel due to degradation from Bell-state measurements. This suggests that purifying distributed Bell states before entanglement swapping is necessary. Although one-way hashing codes are known to saturate the dephasing channel capacity, no explicit two-way purification protocol has previously been shown to achieve this bound. In this work, we present a two-way entanglement purification protocol with an explicit, scalable circuit that asymptotically achieves the dephasing channel capacity. With each iteration, the fidelity of Bell states increases. At the final round, the residual dephasing error is suppressed doubly-exponentially, scaling as O ( p 2 n ) , enabling near-perfect Bell pairs for any fixed number of purification rounds n . The explicit circuit we propose is versatile and applicable to any number of Bell pairs, offering a practical solution for mitigating decoherence in quantum networks and distributed quantum computing.

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.