We present two economical one-step error-correction protocols for multipartite polarization-entangled systems in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. One uses spatial entanglement to correct errors in the polarization entanglement of an
N-photon system, resorting to linear optical elements. The other uses frequency entanglement to correct errors in the polarization entanglement of an
N-photon system. The parties in quantum communication can obtain a maximally entangled state from each
N-photon system transmitted with one step in these two protocols, and both of their success probabilities are
100, in principle. That is, they both work in a deterministic way, and they do not largely consume the less-entangled photon systems, which is far different from conventional multipartite entanglement purification schemes. These features may make these two protocols more useful for practical applications in long-distance quantum communication.
We present a one-step deterministic entanglement purification protocol with linear optics and postselection. Compared with the Simon-Pan protocol [C. Simon and J. W. Pan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 257901 (2002)], this one-step protocol has some advantages. First, it can obtain a maximally entangled pair from each photon pair with only one step, instead of improving the fidelity of less-entangled photon pairs by performing the entanglement purification process repeatedly in other protocols. Second, it works in a deterministic way, not a probabilistic one, which greatly reduces the number of entanglement resources needed. Third, it does not require the polarization state be entangled; only spatial entanglement is needed. Moreover, it is feasible with current techniques [J. W. Pan, S. Gasparonl, R. Ursin, G. Weihs, and A. Zellinger, Nature (London) 423, 417 (2003)]. All these advantages make this one-step protocol more convenient than others in quantum-communication applications.
Multipartite entanglement plays an important role in controlled quantum teleportation, quantum secret sharing, quantum metrology and some other important quantum information branches. However, the maximally multipartite entangled state will degrade into the mixed state because of the noise. We present an efficient multipartite entanglement purification protocol (EPP) which can distill the high quality entangled states from low quality entangled states for N-photon systems in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state in only linear optics. After performing the protocol, the spatial-mode entanglement is used to purify the polarization entanglement and one pair of high quality polarization entangled state will be obtained. This EPP has several advantages. Firstly, with the same purification success probability, this EPP only requires one pair of multipartite GHZ state, while existing EPPs usually require two pairs of multipartite GHZ state. Secondly, if consider the practical transmission and detector efficiency, this EPP may be extremely useful for the ratio of purification efficiency is increased rapidly with both the number of photons and the transmission distance. Thirdly, this protocol requires linear optics and does not add additional measurement operations, so that it is feasible for experiment. All these advantages will make this protocol have potential application for future quantum information processing.