Efficient entanglement concentration for concatenated Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state with the cross-Kerr nonlinearity

Abstract

Concatenated Greenberger---Horne---Zeilinger (C-GHZ) state, which encodes physical qubits in a logic qubit, has great application in the future quantum communication. We present an efficient entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for recovering less-entangled C-GHZ state into the maximally entangled C-GHZ state with the help of cross-Kerr nonlinearities and photon detectors. With the help of the cross-Kerr nonlinearity, the obtained maximally entangled C-GHZ state can be remained for other applications. Moreover, the ECP can be used repeatedly, which can increase the success probability largely. Based on the advantages above, our ECP may be useful in the future long-distance quantum communication.