We study the stability under quantum noise effects of the quantum privacy amplification protocol for the purification of entanglement in quantum cryptography. A systematic numerical study of the impact of all possible single-qubit noise channels is performed. We find that both the qualitative behavior of the fidelity of the purified state as a function of the number of purification steps and the maximum level of noise that can be tolerated by the protocol strongly depend on the specific noise channel. These results provide valuable information for experimental implementations of the quantum privacy amplification protocol.
We study the stability under quantum noise effects of the quantum privacy amplification protocol for the purification of entanglement in quantum cryptography. A systematic numerical study of the impact of all possible single-qubit noise channels is performed. We find that both the qualitative behavior of the fidelity of the purified state as a function of the number of purification steps and the maximum level of noise that can be tolerated by the protocol strongly depend on the specific noise channel. These results provide valuable information for experimental implementations of the quantum privacy amplification protocol.
Existing quantum cryptographic schemes are not, as they stand, operable in the presence of noise on the quantum communication channel. Although they become operable if they are supplemented by classical privacy-amplification techniques, the resulting schemes are difficult to analyze and have not been proved secure. We introduce the concept of quantum privacy amplification and a cryptographic scheme incorporating it which is provably secure over a noisy channel. The scheme uses an ``entanglement purification'' procedure which, because it requires only a few quantum controlled-not and single-qubit operations, could be implemented using technology that is currently being developed.
We consider the effects of gate noise on the operation of an entanglement purification protocol. We characterize the performance of the protocol by two measures, the minimum purifiable input state fidelity, and the maximum output state fidelity. Both these measures are a function of gate error rate. For sufficiently large gate error rate these two measures converge, defining a threshold on gate error rates. Numerically, we estimate this threshold to be 9.2×10−2, which is achievable with many present day experimental architectures. (This paper is written in an experimental rapid communication format).
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.
We study the use of entanglement purification for quantum communication over long distances. For distances much longer than the coherence length of a corresponding noisy quantum channel, the fidelity of transmission is usually so low that standard purification methods are not applicable. It is possible, however, to divide the channel into shorter segments that are purified separately and then connected by the method of entanglement swapping. This method can be much more efficient than schemes based on quantum error correction, as it makes explicit use of two-way classical communication. An important question is how the noise, introduced by imperfect local operations (that constitute the protocols of purification and the entanglement swapping), accumulates in such a compound channel, and how it can be kept below a certain noise level. To treat this problem, we first study the applicability and the efficiency of entanglement purification protocols in the situation of imperfect local operations. We then present a scheme that allows entanglement purification over arbitrary long channels and tolerates errors on the percent level. It requires a polynomial overhead in time, and an overhead in local resources that grows only logarithmically with the length of the channel.
In this thesis, we investigate how protocols in quantum communication theory are influenced by noise. Specifically, we take into account noise during the transmission of quantum information and noise during the processing of quantum information. We describe three novel quantum communication protocols which can be accomplished efficiently in a noisy environment: (1) Factorization of Eve: We show that it is possible to disentangle transmitted qubits a posteriori from the quantum channel's degrees of freedom. (2) Cluster state purification: We give multi-partite entanglement purification protocols for a large class of entangled quantum states. (3) Entanglement purification protocols from quantum codes: We describe a constructive method to create bipartite entanglement purification protocols form quantum error correcting codes, and investigate the properties of these protocols, which can be operated in two different modes, which are related to quantum communication and quantum computation protocols, respectively.
Entanglement purification is a vital protocol to produce a high-quality entangled state from an ensemble of identical states. Based on the particular scheme of entanglement purification [Phys. Rev. A 87, 052316 (2013)], the effect of phase fluctuation is investigated. The convergence pattern of the initial states can be divided into two kinds of regions, corresponding to the purified outcomes being a maximally entangled state (MES) or a separable state. And there is the fractal-like structure near the boundary between these two regions. It is found that the phase noise plays a positive role in generating an MES for an initial states near some fractal boundary, which can only become the separable one if the noise is absent. It is also found that the minimal iteration steps to achieve the maximally entangled state with the phase noise can be decreased, which can save the resource in the protocol.