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Entanglement distillation

Pick the best and ignore the rest

Nature Physics volume 4, pages 909–910 (2008)Cite this article

Entanglement is precious, allowing us to perform all kinds of quantum tricks. But it is easily buried under technical noise. Two experiments show how to distil the 'good parts' from a data stream and recover high-quality entanglement.

Entanglement is a key resource for many quantum technologies. Optical entanglement, be it between single photons or between laser beams, is already being used for several protocols central to quantum cryptography and quantum computation, including the teleportation of information1, quantum key distribution2,3 and quantum logic. However, entanglement is fragile. For example, we can produce entangled laser beams, but the propagation through a normal environment (such as air or glass) can quickly degrade this precious resource. Fortunately, some parts of the photon stream will still contain good strong quantum correlations, and these parts can, in principle, be collected into a slower flow of entangled information of comparable, or even higher, quality than the original4. Two experiments that achieve such distillation from noisy beams are described in this issue. Ruifang Dong and co-workers5 (on page 919) and Boris Hage and colleagues6 (on page 915) show fascinating progress in the field of entanglement distillation by recovering entanglement from laser beams that have experienced non-Gaussian noise.

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Figure 1: Entanglement distillation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hans-Albert Bachor is at the Australian Centre of Excellence for Quantum–Atom Optics, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. hans.bachor@anu.edu.au,

    Hans-Albert Bachor

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  1. Hans-Albert Bachor
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Bachor, HA. Pick the best and ignore the rest. Nature Phys 4, 909–910 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1145

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