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Quantum Information and Computation

Purification of two-qubit mixed states

E. Jan\'e

Published Aug 1, 2002• 7 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We find the necessary and sufficient condition under which two two-qubit mixed states can be purified into a pure maximally entangled state by local operations and classical communication. The optimal protocol for such transformation is obtained. This result leads to a necessary and sufficient condition for the exact purification of $n$ copies of a two-qubit state.

DOI
10.26421/qic2.5-2

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We find the necessary and sufficient condition under which two two-qubit mixed states can be purified into a pure maximally entangled state by local operations and classical communication. The optimal protocol for such transformation is obtained. This result leads to a necessary and sufficient condition for the exact purification of nnn copies of a two-qubit state.
We find the necessary and sufficient condition under which two two-qubit mixed states can be purified into a pure maximally entangled state by local operations and classical communication. The optimal protocol for such transformation is obtained. This result leads to a necessary and sufficient condition for the exact purification of nnn copies of a two-qubit state.
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Linden, Massar, and Popescu have recently given an optimization argument to show that a single two-qubit Werner state, or any other mixture of the maximally entangled Bell states, cannot be purified by local operations and classical communications. We generalize their result and give a simple explanation. In particular, we show that no purification scheme using local operations and classical communications can produce a pure singlet from any mixed state of two spin- 1/21/21/2 particles. More generally, no such scheme can produce a maximally entangled state of any pair of finite-dimensional systems from a generic mixed state. We also show that the Werner states belong to a large class of states whose fidelity cannot be increased by such a scheme.
Known entanglement purification protocols for mixed states use collective measurements on several copies of the state in order to increase the entanglement of some of them. We address the question of whether it is possible to purify the entanglement of a state by processing each copy separately. While this is possible for pure states, we show that this is impossible, in general, for mixed states. The importance of this result both conceptually and for experimental realization of purification is discussed. We also give explicit invariants of an entangled state of two qubits under local actions and classical communication.
We determine the preshared entanglement required for spatially separated parties, restricted to local operations and classical communication, to attain globally optimal probabilistic two-copy purification of arbitrary bipartite pure states under depolarizing noise. In every local dimension d≥2d\ge 2d≥2, one shared maximally entangled qubit pair suffices: local controlled-SWAP operations exactly reproduce the globally optimal successful transformation. Conversely, any finite-dimensional preshared resource state that attains the same benchmark, even under a positive-partial-transpose relaxation, must have entanglement of formation at least one ebit. For pure resources with one ebit, or for two-qubit resources including mixed states, attaining the benchmark is possible only for states with exactly two nonzero Schmidt weights, both equal to 1/21/21/2, namely those locally unitarily equivalent to a maximally entangled qubit pair. These findings provide a benchmark for evaluating the entanglement demands of noise management in quantum networks and modular quantum computers.
Purifying noisy entanglement is a protocol that can increase the entanglement of a mixed state (as a source) at the expense of the entanglement of others (such as an ancilla) by collective measurement. A protocol with which one can get a pure entangled state from a mixed state is defined as purifying mixed states. We address a basic question: can one get a pure entangled state from a mixed state? We give a necessary and sufficient condition of purifying a mixed state by fit local operations and classical communication and show that for a class of source states and ancilla states in arbitrary bipartite systems purifying mixed states is impossible by finite rounds of purifying protocols. For $2\ensuremath{\bigotimes}2$ systems, it is proved that arbitrary states cannot be purified by individual measurement. The possible application and meaning of the conclusion are discussed.