Distillation of arbitrary single-photon entanglement assisted with polarized Bell states

Abstract

Single-photon entanglement (SPE) is a promising resource in quantum communication. However, it will suffer from the photon loss. In this paper, we will present an efficient approach to protect the two-mode SPE. This protocol not only can distill the SPE from the mixed state, but also can faithfully protect the information encoded in the polarization degree of freedom. Moreover, different from the previous protocols, if the SPE becomes a less-entangled state, we can also distill it to the maximally entangled state. During the whole protocol, we exploit the polarized Bell states to complete the task. This protocol can also be extended to protect the single-photon multi-mode W state. This protocol is feasible in current technology, for it only requires linear optical elements.