Single-Step Distillation Protocol with Generalized Beam Splitters

We develop a distillation protocol for multilevel qubits (qudits) using generalized beam splitters like in the proposal of Pan et al. for ordinary qubits. We find an acceleration with respect to the scheme of Bennet et al. when extended to qudits. It is also possible to distill entangled pairs of photons carrying orbital angular momenta (OAM) states that conserves the total angular momenta as those produced in recent experiments.Comment: REVTEX4 file, color figure

Distillation Protocols for Mixed States of Multilevel Qubits and the Quantum Renormalization Group

We study several properties of distillation protocols to purify multilevel qubit states (qudits) when applied to a certain family of initial mixed bipartite states. We find that it is possible to use qudits states to increase the stability region obtained with the flow equations to distill qubits. In particular, for qutrits we get the phase diagram of the distillation process with a rich structure of fixed points. We investigate the large-$D$ limit of qudits protocols and find an analytical solution in the continuum limit. The general solution of the distillation recursion relations is presented in an appendix. We stress the notion of weight amplification for distillation protocols as opposed to the quantum amplitude amplification that appears in the Grover algorithm. Likewise, we investigate the relations between quantum distillation and quantum renormalization processes.Comment: REVTEX4 file, 12 pages, 3 tables, color figure

Phase diagram of ferrimagnetic ladders with bond-alternation

We study the phase diagram of a 2-leg bond-alternation spin-(1/2, 1) ladder for two different configurations using a quantum renormalization group approach. Although d-dimensional ferrimagnets show gapless behavior, we will explicitly show that the effect of the spin mixing and the bond-alternation can open the possibility for observing an energy gap. We show that the gapless phases of such systems can be equivalent to the 1-dimensional half-integer antiferroamgnets, besides the gapless ferrimagnetic phases. We therefore propose a phase transition between these two gapless phases that can be seen in the parameter space.Comment: 5 pages and 3 ps figures, accepted in Phys. Rev.