On the experimental feasibility of continuous-variable optical entanglement distillation

Entanglement distillation aims at preparing highly entangled states out of a supply of weakly entangled pairs, using local devices and classical communication only. In this note we discuss the experimentally feasible schemes for optical continuous-variable entanglement distillation that have been presented in [D.E. Browne, J. Eisert, S. Scheel, and M.B. Plenio, Phys. Rev. A 67, 062320 (2003)] and [J. Eisert, D.E. Browne, S. Scheel, and M.B. Plenio, Annals of Physics (NY) 311, 431 (2004)]. We emphasize their versatility in particular with regards to the detection process and discuss the merits of the two proposed detection schemes, namely photo-detection and homodyne detection, in the light of experimental realizations of this idea becoming more and more feasible.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, contribution to conference proceeding

Optimal entanglement witnesses for continuous-variable systems

This paper is concerned with all tests for continuous-variable entanglement that arise from linear combinations of second moments or variances of canonical coordinates, as they are commonly used in experiments to detect entanglement. All such tests for bi-partite and multi-partite entanglement correspond to hyperplanes in the set of second moments. It is shown that all optimal tests, those that are most robust against imperfections with respect to some figure of merit for a given state, can be constructed from solutions to semi-definite optimization problems. Moreover, we show that for each such test, referred to as entanglement witness based on second moments, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the witness and a stronger product criterion, which amounts to a non-linear witness, based on the same measurements. This generalizes the known product criteria. The presented tests are all applicable also to non-Gaussian states. To provide a service to the community, we present the documentation of two numerical routines, FULLYWIT and MULTIWIT, which have been made publicly available.Comment: 14 pages LaTeX, 1 figure, presentation improved, references update

Positive Wigner functions render classical simulation of quantum computation efficient

We show that quantum circuits where the initial state and all the following quantum operations can be represented by positive Wigner functions can be classically efficiently simulated. This is true both for continuous-variable as well as discrete variable systems in odd prime dimensions, two cases which will be treated on entirely the same footing. Noting the fact that Clifford and Gaussian operations preserve the positivity of the Wigner function, our result generalizes the Gottesman-Knill theorem. Our algorithm provides a way of sampling from the output distribution of a computation or a simulation, including the efficient sampling from an approximate output distribution in case of sampling imperfections for initial states, gates, or measurements. In this sense, this work highlights the role of the positive Wigner function as separating classically efficiently simulatable systems from those that are potentially universal for quantum computing and simulation, and it emphasizes the role of negativity of the Wigner function as a computational resource.Comment: 7 pages, minor change