Entanglement properties of optical coherent states under amplitude damping

Abstract

Through concurrence, we characterize the entanglement properties of optical coherent-state qubits subject to an amplitude damping channel. We investigate the distillation capabilities of known error correcting codes and obtain upper bounds on the entanglement depending on the non-orthogonality of the coherent states and the channel damping parameter. This work provides a first, full quantitative analysis of these photon-loss codes which are naturally reminiscent of the standard qubit codes against Pauli errors.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. Revised version with small corrections; main results remain unaltere