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Experimental entanglement distillation of mesoscopic quantum states

Nature Physics volume 4, pages 919–923 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

The distribution of entangled states between distant parties in an optical network is crucial for the successful implementation of various quantum communication protocols such as quantum cryptography, teleportation and dense coding1,2,3. However, owing to the unavoidable loss in any real optical channel, the distribution of loss-intolerant entangled states is inevitably afflicted by decoherence, which causes a degradation of the transmitted entanglement. To combat the decoherence, entanglement distillation, a process of extracting a small set of highly entangled states from a large set of less entangled states, can be used4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14. Here we report on the distillation of deterministically prepared light pulses entangled in continuous variables that have undergone non-Gaussian noise. The entangled light pulses15,16,17 are sent through a lossy channel, where the transmission is varying in time similarly to light propagation in the atmosphere. By using linear optical components and global classical communication, the entanglement is probabilistically increased.

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Figure 1: Schematic diagrams of the entanglement distillation protocol and the experimental set-up.
Figure 2: Experimentally measured marginal distributions illustrating the effect of distillation.
Figure 3: Experimental and theoretical results outlining the distillation of an entangled state from a discrete lossy channel.
Figure 4: Experimental and theoretical results outlining the distillation of an entangled state from a semicontinuous lossy channel.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the EU project COMPAS (No. 212008), the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft and the Danish Agency for Science Technology and Innovation (No. 274-07-0509). M.L. and R.F. acknowledge support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and R.F. acknowledges Measurement and Information in Optics (MSM6198959213), LC 06007 of the Czech Ministry of Education and 202/07/J040 of GACR.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Optik, Information und Photonik, Max-Planck Forschungsgruppe, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Günther-Scharowsky-Str. 1, 91058, Erlangen, Germany

    Ruifang Dong, Mikael Lassen, Joel Heersink, Christoph Marquardt, Radim Filip, Gerd Leuchs & Ulrik L. Andersen

  2. Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark, Building 309, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

    Mikael Lassen & Ulrik L. Andersen

  3. Department of Optics, Palacký University, 17. listopadu 50, 77200 Olomouc, Czech Republic

    Radim Filip

Authors
  1. Ruifang Dong
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  2. Mikael Lassen
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  3. Joel Heersink
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  4. Christoph Marquardt
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  5. Radim Filip
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  6. Gerd Leuchs
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  7. Ulrik L. Andersen
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Correspondence to Ulrik L. Andersen.

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Dong, R., Lassen, M., Heersink, J. et al. Experimental entanglement distillation of mesoscopic quantum states. Nature Phys 4, 919–923 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1112

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