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arXiv:2609.39916

Distillation of N-Qubit Stabilizer States on a Star Network Topology

Theodore M. Mahaffey, Chaohan Cui, Saikat Guha, Murphy Yuezhen Niu

quant-phSubmitted Sep 30, 2026• Announced Oct 1, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We introduce an entanglement distillation protocol that utilizes an arbitrary $[[n,k,d]]$ stabilizer code to convert $n$ raw copies of an $N$-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state into $k$ logical copies in the presence of Pauli noise. Our explicit formulation of the scheme on a star network topology is efficiently scalable to arbitrary $N$, requires only local operations, and minimizes the impact of errors on idle physical qubits, enabling the distribution of high-fidelity entangled logical states between any number of quantum processors. We report the results of numerical experiments using the 5-qubit code, toric code, and $[[144,12,12]]$ bivariate bicyle code to protect against independent single-qubit depolarizing noise on all qubits. Our encoding scheme improves the final GHZ state fidelity relative to a single bare GHZ state sent over the same noisy channel for depolarizing rates up to or above $6 \%$ for all codes tested. Additionally, we use the stabilizer formalism to prove that our protocol can be applied to any $N$-qubit Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) stabilizer state, from which the GHZ state emerges as a special case. This result explicitly establishes the working principle of previous stabilizer-based Bell pair and GHZ state distillation schemes, and generalizes such protocols beyond the traditionally considered states. We also show that some stabilizer codes can distill any stabilizer state with our protocol.

Comments
22 pages, 4 figures

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We introduce an entanglement distillation protocol that utilizes an arbitrary [[n,k,d]][[n,k,d]][[n,k,d]] stabilizer code to convert nnn raw copies of an NNN-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state into kkk logical copies in the presence of Pauli noise. Our explicit formulation of the scheme on a star network topology is efficiently scalable to arbitrary NNN, requires only local operations, and minimizes the impact of errors on idle physical qubits, enabling the distribution of high-fidelity entangled logical states between any number of quantum processors. We report the results of numerical experiments using the 5-qubit code, toric code, and [[144,12,12]][[144,12,12]][[144,12,12]] bivariate bicyle code to protect against independent single-qubit depolarizing noise on all qubits. Our encoding scheme improves the final GHZ state fidelity relative to a single bare GHZ state sent over the same noisy channel for depolarizing rates up to or above 6%6 \%6% for all codes tested. Additionally, we use the stabilizer formalism to prove that our protocol can be applied to any NNN-qubit Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) stabilizer state, from which the GHZ state emerges as a special case. This result explicitly establishes the working principle of previous stabilizer-based Bell pair and GHZ state distillation schemes, and generalizes such protocols beyond the traditionally considered states. We also show that some stabilizer codes can distill any stabilizer state with our protocol.
Entanglement distribution is a critical task in quantum networks. Since the distributed entanglement can suffer from noise in the channel, it is necessary to develop methods that distill higher quality entanglement from the shared noisy entangled states. In this work, we propose a protocol to distill multi-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states among the nodes of a network using quantum error correcting codes. The method builds upon a Bell state distillation protocol by Wilde et at. (2007) that we recently generalized to 3-qubit GHZ states. The key technical result that enables our protocol shows how measuring a Pauli operator, or in general a set of code stabilizers, on one subsystem of a multipartite GHZ state affects the other subsystems. The design and analysis of the protocol is driven by the stabilizer formalism for measurements, and we provide discussions to elucidate the steps of the protocol. A similar approach can be applied to distill other multipartite entangled states as long as they are stabilizer states.
Entanglement distillation is a well-studied problem in quantum information, where one typically starts with nnn noisy Bell pairs and distills kkk Bell pairs of higher fidelity. While distilling Bell pairs is the canonical setting, it is important to study the distillation of multipartite entangled states because these can be useful for realizing distributed algorithms on quantum networks. In this paper, we study the distillation of GHZ states using quantum error correcting codes (QECCs). Using the stabilizer formalism, we begin by explaining the QECC-based Bell pair distillation protocol in arXiv:0708.3699, which relies particularly on the transpose symmetry between Alice's and Bob's qubits in Bell states. Extending this idea, we show that, given nnn GHZ states, performing a matrix on Alice's qubits is equivalent to performing a "stretched" version of the transpose of the matrix on the qubits of Bob and Charlie. We call this mapping to the stretched version of the matrix the GHZ-map, and show that it is an algebra homomorphism. Using this property, we show that Alice projecting her qubits onto an [[n,k]][[n,k]][[n,k]] stabilizer code implies the simultaneous projection of Bob's and Charlie's qubits onto an induced [[2n,k]][[2n,k]][[2n,k]] stabilizer code. Guided by this insight, we develop a GHZ distillation protocol based on local operations and classical communication that uses any stabilizer code. Inspired by stabilizer measurements on GHZ states, we also develop a new algorithm to generate logical Pauli operators of any stabilizer code and use it in the protocol. Since quantum codes with finite rate and almost linear minimum distance have recently been discovered, this paper paves the way for high-rate high-output-fidelity GHZ distillation. We provide simulation results on the 555-qubit perfect code to emphasize the importance of the placement of a certain local Clifford operation in the protocol.
The distribution of high-quality Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states is at the heart of many quantum communication tasks, ranging from extending the baseline of telescopes to secret sharing. They also play an important role in error-correction architectures for distributed quantum computation, where Bell pairs can be leveraged to create an entangled network of quantum computers. We investigate the creation and distillation of GHZ states out of nonperfect Bell pairs over quantum networks. In particular, we introduce a heuristic dynamic programming algorithm to optimize over a large class of protocols that create and purify GHZ states. All protocols considered use a common framework based on measurements of nonlocal stabilizer operators of the target state (i.e., the GHZ state), where each nonlocal measurement consumes another (nonperfect) entangled state as a resource. The new protocols outperform previous proposals for scenarios without decoherence and local gate noise. Furthermore, the algorithms can be applied for finding protocols for any number of parties and any number of entangled pairs involved.
We develop an efficient local operation and classical communication (LOCC) scheme for the distillation of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states from tripartite systems subjected to both coherent and incoherent errors. The proposed method employs an iterative process that applies a postselection-based non-linear transformation to increase the entanglement of 3-qubit states. In contrast to traditional distillation protocols that require an exponential number of initial states as a resource, our method achieves subexponential convergence towards a pure GHZ state. The proposed scheme is practical in the sense that it employs a small set of relatively simple unitary operations and projective measurements in the computational basis. We systematically develop a double-iteration protocol by providing a mathematical framework for the transformation processes involved, emphasizing the role of unitary operations in correcting arbitrary small errors in the initial states. Through analytical derivations and numerical simulations, we demonstrate the protocol's ability to progressively eliminate noise and improve fidelity over subsequent iterations. Significantly, our protocol not only corrects for small arbitrary distortions in the GHZ states but also maintains operational simplicity, making it feasible for practical quantum computing applications.
Recent constructions of quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes provide optimal scaling of the number of logical qubits and the minimum distance in terms of the code length, thereby opening the door to fault-tolerant quantum systems with minimal resource overhead. However, the hardware path from nearest-neighbor-connection-based topological codes to long-range-interaction-demanding QLDPC codes is likely a challenging one. Given the practical difficulty in building a monolithic architecture for quantum systems, such as computers, based on optimal QLDPC codes, it is worth considering a distributed implementation of such codes over a network of interconnected medium-sized quantum processors. In such a setting, all syndrome measurements and logical operations must be performed through the use of high-fidelity shared entangled states between the processing nodes. Since probabilistic many-to-1 distillation schemes for purifying entanglement are inefficient, we investigate quantum error correction based entanglement purification in this work. Specifically, we employ QLDPC codes to distill GHZ states, as the resulting high-fidelity logical GHZ states can interact directly with the code used to perform distributed quantum computing (DQC), e.g. for fault-tolerant Steane syndrome extraction. This protocol is applicable beyond the application of DQC since entanglement distribution and purification is a quintessential task of any quantum network. We use the min-sum algorithm (MSA) based iterative decoder with a sequential schedule for distilling 3 -qubit GHZ states using a rate 0.118 family of lifted product QLDPC codes and obtain an input fidelity threshold of ≈0.7974 under i.i.d. single-qubit depolarizing noise. This represents the best threshold for a yield of 0.118 for any GHZ purification protocol. Our results apply to larger size GHZ states as well, where we extend our technical result about a measurement property of 3 -qubit GHZ states to construct a scalable GHZ purification protocol.
Magic-state distillation is a protocol to purify noisy quantum states using quantum stabilizer codes. In this paper, we provide conditions for identifying magic states along with analytical expressions for computing the noise threshold. Through quantum entropic results, we prove the convergence of the magic-state distillation procedure. We derive analytical results to show how the noise threshold scales as a function of the minimum distance and the number of physical qudits of the underlying quantum stabilizer code. We distill $|T\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and $|S\ensuremath{\rangle}$ states with thresholds 0.498 (theoretical limit is 0.5) and 0.71 (theoretical limit is 0.75) over the depolarizing channel using [[31,1,16]]2{[[31,1,16]]}_{2}[[31,1,16]]2​ quantum Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem code and [[29,1,15]]3{[[29,1,15]]}_{3}[[29,1,15]]3​ quantum qutrit code, respectively. Finally, encoding algorithms based on quantum Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) and non-CSS qudit stabilizer codes along with circuits are proposed for magic-state distillation.