The Minimum Distance Problem for Two-Way Entanglement Purification

Entanglement purification takes a number of noisy EPR pairs and processes them to produce a smaller number of more reliable pairs. If this is done with only a forward classical side channel, the procedure is equivalent to using a quantum error-correcting code (QECC). We instead investigate entanglement purification protocols with two-way classical side channels (2-EPPs) for finite block sizes. In particular, we consider the analog of the minimum distance problem for QECCs, and show that 2-EPPs can exceed the quantum Hamming bound and the quantum Singleton bound. We also show that 2-EPPs can achieve the rate k/n = 1 - (t/n) \log_2 3 - h(t/n) - O(1/n) (asymptotically reaching the quantum Hamming bound), where the EPP produces at least k good pairs out of n total pairs with up to t arbitrary errors, and h(x) = -x \log_2 x - (1-x) \log_2 (1-x) is the usual binary entropy. In contrast, the best known lower bound on the rate of QECCs is the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov bound k/n \geq 1 - (2t/n) \log_2 3 - h(2t/n). Indeed, in some regimes, the known upper bound on the asymptotic rate of good QECCs is strictly below our lower bound on the achievable rate of 2-EPPs.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX. v2: New title, minor corrections and clarifications, some new references. v3: One more small correction. v4: More small clarifications, final version to appear in IEEE Trans. Info. Theor

Communicating over adversarial quantum channels using quantum list codes

We study quantum communication in the presence of adversarial noise. In this setting, communicating with perfect fidelity requires using a quantum code of bounded minimum distance, for which the best known rates are given by the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov (QGV) bound. By asking only for arbitrarily high fidelity and allowing the sender and reciever to use a secret key with length logarithmic in the number of qubits sent, we achieve a dramatic improvement over the QGV rates. In fact, we find protocols that achieve arbitrarily high fidelity at noise levels for which perfect fidelity is impossible. To achieve such communication rates, we introduce fully quantum list codes, which may be of independent interest.Comment: 6 pages. Discussion expanded and more details provided in proofs. Far less unclear than previous versio

Improvement of stabilizer based entanglement distillation protocols by encoding operators

This paper presents a method for enumerating all encoding operators in the Clifford group for a given stabilizer. Furthermore, we classify encoding operators into the equivalence classes such that EDPs (Entanglement Distillation Protocol) constructed from encoding operators in the same equivalence class have the same performance. By this classification, for a given parameter, the number of candidates for good EDPs is significantly reduced. As a result, we find the best EDP among EDPs constructed from [[4,2]] stabilizer codes. This EDP has a better performance than previously known EDPs over wide range of fidelity.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures, In version 2, we enumerate all encoding operators in the Clifford group, and fix the wrong classification of encoding operators in version

An Adaptive Entanglement Distillation Scheme Using Quantum Low Density Parity Check Codes

Quantum low density parity check (QLDPC) codes are useful primitives for quantum information processing because they can be encoded and decoded efficiently. Besides, the error correcting capability of a few QLDPC codes exceeds the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov bound. Here, we report a numerical performance analysis of an adaptive entanglement distillation scheme using QLDPC codes. In particular, we find that the expected yield of our adaptive distillation scheme to combat depolarization errors exceed that of Leung and Shor whenever the error probability is less than about 0.07 or greater than about 0.28. This finding illustrates the effectiveness of using QLDPC codes in entanglement distillation.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Entanglement Distillation; A Discourse on Bound Entanglement in Quantum Information Theory

PhD thesis (University of York). The thesis covers in a unified way the material presented in quant-ph/0403073, quant-ph/0502040, quant-ph/0504160, quant-ph/0510035, quant-ph/0512012 and quant-ph/0603283. It includes two large review chapters on entanglement and distillation.Comment: 192 page