In this paper, we introduce a novel heuristic approach designed to optimize the performance of Greenberger-Horne- Zeilinger (GHZ) creation and distillation protocols under decoherence. Our methodology converts these protocols into a practical set of instructions, demonstrating, through simulations, the production of higher-quality GHZ states than previously known protocols. This advancement contributes to the field of distributed quantum computing by addressing the need for high-quality entanglement required for operations between different quantum computers.
In this paper, we introduce a novel heuristic approach designed to optimize the performance of Greenberger-Horne- Zeilinger (GHZ) creation and distillation protocols under decoherence. Our methodology converts these protocols into a practical set of instructions, demonstrating, through simulations, the production of higher-quality GHZ states than previously known protocols. This advancement contributes to the field of distributed quantum computing by addressing the need for high-quality entanglement required for operations between different quantum computers.
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 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.
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.
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.
We present optimized distillation schemes for preparing Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. Our approach relies on training variational quantum circuits with white noise affected GHZ states as inputs. Optimizing for a single iteration of the scheme, we find that it is possible to achieve an increased fidelity to the GHZ state, although further iterations decrease the fidelity. The same scheme, acting on coherently distorted pure-state inputs, is effective only in certain special cases. We show that radically different results can be achieved, however, when one optimizes for the output after two iterations of the protocol. In this case, the obtained schemes are more effective in distilling GHZ states from inputs affected by white noise. Moreover, they can also correct several types of coherent pure-state errors.
Abstract Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states [1], also known as two-component Schr\"{o}dinger cats, play vital roles in the foundation of quantum physics and, more attractively, in future quantum technologies such as fault-tolerant quantum computation [2, 3]. Enlargement in size and coherent control of GHZ states are both crucial for harnessing entanglement in advanced computational tasks with practical advantages, which unfortunately pose tremendous challenges as GHZ states are vulnerable to noise [4, 5]. Here we propose a general strategy for creating, preserving, and manipulating large-scale GHZ entanglement, and demonstrate a series of experiments underlined by high-fidelity digital quantum circuits. For initialization, we employ a scalable protocol to create genuinely entangled GHZ states with up to 60 qubits, almost doubling the previous size record [6]. For protection, we take a new perspective on discrete time crystals (DTCs) [7–16], originally for exploring exotic nonequilibrium quantum matters, and embed a GHZ state into the eigenstates of a tailor-made cat scar DTC [17] to extend its lifetime. For manipulation, we switch the DTC eigenstates with in-situ quantum gates to modify the effectiveness of the GHZ protection. Our findings establish a viable path towards coherent operations on large-scale entanglement, and further highlight superconducting processors as a promising platform to explore nonequilibrium quantum matters and emerging applications.