Asymptotic adaptive bipartite entanglement-distillation protocol

Abstract

We present a new asymptotic bipartite entanglement distillation protocol that outperforms all existing asymptotic schemes. This protocol is based on the breeding protocol with the incorporation of two-way classical communication. Like breeding, the protocol starts with an infinite number of copies of a Bell-diagonal mixed state. Breeding can be carried out as successive stages of partial information extraction, yielding the same result: one bit of information is gained at the cost (measurement) of one pure Bell state pair (ebit). The basic principle of our protocol is at every stage to replace measurements on ebits by measurements on a finite number of copies, whenever there are two equiprobable outcomes. In that case, the entropy of the global state is reduced by more than one bit. Therefore, every such replacement results in an improvement of the protocol. We explain how our protocol is organized as to have as many replacements as possible. The yield is then calculated for Werner states.