Entanglement distillation by dissipation and continuous quantum repeaters

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that entanglement distillation can be achieved through dissipative processes, leading to highly entangled steady states and scalable quantum repeater architectures, even in noisy environments.

Contribution

It introduces dissipative entanglement distillation schemes that produce high-quality entanglement and can be integrated into continuous quantum repeaters with polynomial resource scaling.

Findings

Dissipative schemes can produce steady-state entanglement.

Adding noise can improve entanglement performance.

Dissipative repeaters scale polynomially with distance.

Abstract

Even though entanglement is very vulnerable to interactions with the environment, it can be created by purely dissipative processes. Yet, the attainable degree of entanglement is profoundly limited in the presence of noise sources. We show that distillation can also be realized dissipatively, such that a highly entanglement steady state is obtained. The schemes put forward here display counterintuitive phenomena, such as improved performance if noise is added to the system. We also show how dissipative distillation can be employed in a continuous quantum repeater architecture, in which the resources scale polynomially with the distance.