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Physical Review Letters

Observation of Residual Entanglement in Entanglement Purification

Lan Zhou, Cen-Xiao Huang, Yu‐Bo Sheng, Yu Guo, Xiao-Min Hu, Yun‐Feng Huang, Chuan‐Feng Li, Guang‐Can Guo, Bi‐Heng Liu

Published Jul 1, 2025• 14 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Entanglement purification is to distill high-quality entanglement from low-quality entanglement. Entanglement purification determines the efficiency and communication rates and plays a key role in quantum repeaters and long-distance quantum communications. Existing entanglement purification protocols and proof of principle experiments usually choose two identical input pairs. They are limited to focus on the successful purification case to obtain high-quality entangled states and discard the remained items if the purification fails. Recent entanglement purification theory [Opt. Express 28, 2291 (2020)OPEXFF1094-408710.1364/OE.383499] for arbitrary nonidentical input mixed states indicated that the discarded items may have residual entanglement and can be reused to increase the yield of entanglement purification, while the successful purification may not obtain a high-quality entangled state. In this Letter, using hyperentanglement, we design and experimentally demonstrate an entanglement purification protocol with nonidentical input mixed states. For the first time, we experimentally confirm the existence of residual entanglement in different error models. Furthermore, we illustrate that successful purification may decrease the fidelity of purified entangled states. We also demonstrate the approach of optimal entanglement purification. Our proof of principle results have potential applications in future high-efficiency and long-distance quantum communication.

DOI
10.1103/kbw2-fdqn

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Entanglement purification is to distill high-quality entanglement from low-quality entanglement. Entanglement purification determines the efficiency and communication rates and plays a key role in quantum repeaters and long-distance quantum communications. Existing entanglement purification protocols and proof of principle experiments usually choose two identical input pairs. They are limited to focus on the successful purification case to obtain high-quality entangled states and discard the remained items if the purification fails. Recent entanglement purification theory [Opt. Express 28, 2291 (2020)OPEXFF1094-408710.1364/OE.383499] for arbitrary nonidentical input mixed states indicated that the discarded items may have residual entanglement and can be reused to increase the yield of entanglement purification, while the successful purification may not obtain a high-quality entangled state. In this Letter, using hyperentanglement, we design and experimentally demonstrate an entanglement purification protocol with nonidentical input mixed states. For the first time, we experimentally confirm the existence of residual entanglement in different error models. Furthermore, we illustrate that successful purification may decrease the fidelity of purified entangled states. We also demonstrate the approach of optimal entanglement purification. Our proof of principle results have potential applications in future high-efficiency and long-distance quantum communication.
Entanglement purification is an indispensable ingredient in extended quantum communication networks and usually determines the efficiency and communication rate of quantum communication protocols. Different from all existing entanglement purification protocols (EPPs) where two or more copies of low quality mixed entangled states are selected from the same ensemble, here we describe a general and optimal EPP for arbitrary initial mixed states from different ensembles. We show that the successful operation of EPP may not obtain a higher fidelity mixed state, while the discarded source pair, which is usually regarded as a failure in existing EPPs, may have residual entanglement and can be reused to increase the yield of entanglement purification. We give the criterions of both the successful purification to obtain a higher fidelity mixed state and the existence of residual entanglement. Moreover, we reveal that entanglement purification procedure causes some entanglement loss. Finally, we provide an optimal approach to reduce the entanglement loss. This approach can also be used to increase the yield of entanglement purification. Our EPP may have potential application in long-distance quantum communications.
High-quality long-distance entanglement is essential for both quantum communication and scalable quantum networks. Entanglement purification is to distill high-quality entanglement from low-quality entanglement in a noisy environment and it plays a key role in quantum repeaters. The previous significant entanglement purification experiments require two pairs of low-quality entangled states and were demonstrated in tabletop. Here we propose and report a high-efficiency and long-distance entanglement purification using only one pair of hyperentangled state. We also demonstrate its practical application in entanglement-based quantum key distribution (QKD). One pair of polarization spatial-mode hyperentanglement was distributed over 11 km multicore fiber (noisy channel). After purification, the fidelity of polarization entanglement arises from 0.771 to 0.887 and the effective key rate in entanglement-based QKD increases from 0 to 0.332. The values of Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality of polarization entanglement arises from 1.829 to 2.128. Moreover, by using one pair of hyperentanglement and deterministic controlled-NOT gates, the total purification efficiency can be estimated as 6.6×10^{3} times than the experiment using two pairs of entangled states with spontaneous parametric down-conversion sources. Our results offer the potential to be implemented as part of a full quantum repeater and large-scale quantum network.
Entanglement purification is an essential component of quantum repeaters, as it can improve the fidelity of the distributed entangled states and mitigate the effects of the noisy channel. Successful purification yields entangled states with increased fidelity, whereas failed events can still retain residual entanglement that remains usable for further purification when the error rates of the two degrees of freedom (DOFs) are unbalanced. In this paper, we demonstrate a single-copy entanglement purification scheme based on hyperentanglement using silicon chips and experimentally observe the presence of residual entanglement. Leveraging the reconfigurability of integrated photonics, our scheme ensures that, under bit-flip noise acting on the two DOFs, residual entanglement suitable for further purification can always be obtained, regardless of which DOF has the higher error rate. Our results demonstrate the advantages of integrated photonics for quantum information processing and provide guidance for the optimized utilization of entanglement resources in on-chip entanglement purification and future quantum repeater systems.
Entanglement purification is a powerful method to distill the high-quality entanglement from low-quality entanglement. In the paper, we propose an efficient two-step entanglement purification protocol (EPP) for the polarization entanglement by using only one copy of two-photon hyperentangled state in polarization, spatial-mode, and time-bin DOFs. We suppose that the entanglement in all DOFs suffer from channel noise. In two purification steps, the parties can reduce the bit-flip error and phase-flip error in polarization DOF by consuming the imperfect entanglement in the spatial-mode and time-bin DOFs, respectively. This EPP effectively reduces the consumption of entanglement pairs and the experimental difficulty. Moreover, if consider the practical photon transmission and detector efficiencies, our EPP has much higher purification efficiency than previous recurrence EPPs. Meanwhile, when one or two purification steps fail, the distilled mixed state may have residual entanglement. Taking use of the residual entanglement, the parties may still distill higher-quality polarization entanglement. Even if not, they can still reuse the residual entanglement in the next purification round. The existence of residual entanglement benefits for increasing the yield of the EPP. All the above advantages make our EPP have potential application in future quantum information processing.
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.
The entangled coherent states (ECSs) have been widely used to realize quantum information processing tasks. However, the ECSs may suffer from photon loss and decoherence due to the inherent noise in quantum channel, which may degrade the fidelity of ECSs. To overcome these obstacles, we present a measurement-based entanglement purification protocol (MBEPP) for ECSs to distill some high-quality ECSs from a large number of low-quality copies. We first show the principle of this MBEPP without considering the photon loss. After that, we prove that this MBEPP is feasible to correct the error resulted from the photon loss. Additionally, this MBEPP only requires to operate the Bell state measurement without performing local two-qubit gates on the noisy pairs and the purified high-quality ECSs can be preserved for other applications. This MBEPP may have application potential in the implementation of long-distance quantum communication.