Multiparty quantum protocols for assisted entanglement distillation

  • Authors:
  • Nicolas Dutil

  • Affiliations:
  • McGill University (Canada)

  • Venue:
  • Multiparty quantum protocols for assisted entanglement distillation
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Quantum information theory is a multidisciplinary field whose objective is to understand what happens when information is stored in the state of a quantum system. Quantum mechanics provides us with a new resource, called quantum entanglement, which can be exploited to achieve novel tasks such as teleportation and superdense coding. Current technologies allow the transmission of entangled photon pairs across distances up to roughly 100 kilometers. For longer distances, noise arising from various sources degrade the transmission of entanglement to the point that it becomes impossible to use the entanglement as a resource for future tasks. One strategy for dealing with this difficulty is to employ quantum repeaters, stations intermediate between the sender and receiver that can participate in the process of entanglement distillation, thereby improving on what the sender and receiver could do on their own.Motivated by the problem of designing quantum repeaters, we study entanglement distillation between two parties, Alice and Bob, starting from a mixed state and with the help of repeater stations. We extend the notion of entanglement of assistance to arbitrary tripartite states and exhibit a protocol, based on a random coding strategy, for extracting pure entanglement. We use these results to find achievable rates for the more general scenario, where many spatially separated repeaters help two recipients distill entanglement.We also study multiparty quantum communication protocols in a more general context. We give a new protocol for the task of multiparty state merging. The previous multiparty state merging protocol required the use of time-sharing, an impossible strategy when a single copy of the input state is available to the parties. Our protocol does not require time-sharing for distributed compression of two senders. In the one-shot regime, we can achieve multiparty state merging with entanglement costs not restricted to corner points of the entanglement cost region. Our analysis of the entanglement cost is performed using (smooth) min- and max-entropies. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by looking at different examples.