Optimal Distillation of Coherent States with Phase-Insensitive Operations

TL;DR

This paper presents an optimal protocol for distilling coherent states from noisy thermal states using phase-insensitive operations, revealing a fundamental link between error and the coherence purity metric, and demonstrating a non-Gaussian optimal process implementable with linear optics.

Contribution

It introduces a new optimal distillation protocol for coherent states that surpasses Gaussian channels, with a clear operational interpretation of the RLD Fisher information.

Findings

Error is inversely proportional to the coherence purity of the input.

The optimal protocol is non-Gaussian, despite Gaussian states being involved.

A simple linear optical scheme achieves the optimal distillation.

Abstract

By combining multiple copies of noisy coherent states of light (or other bosonic systems), it is possible to obtain a single mode in a state with lesser noise, a process known as distillation or purification of coherent states. We investigate the distillation of coherent states from coherent thermal states under general phase-insensitive operations, and find a distillation protocol that is optimal in the asymptotic regime, i.e., when the number of input copies is much greater than 1. Remarkably, we find that in this regime, the error -- as quantified by infidelity (one minus the fidelity) of the output state with the desired coherent state -- is proportional to the inverse of the purity of coherence of the input state, a quantity obtained from the Right-Logarithmic-Derivative (RLD) Fisher information metric, hence revealing an operational interpretation of this quantity. The heart of this protocol is a phase-insensitive channel that optimally converts an input coherent thermal state with high amplitude, into an output with significantly lower amplitude and temperature. Under this channel, the purity of coherence remains asymptotically conserved. While both the input and desired output are Gaussian states, we find that the optimal protocol cannot be a Gaussian channel. Among Gaussian phase-insensitive channels, the optimal distillation protocol is a simple linear optical scheme that can be implemented with beam splitters.