Experimental distillation of tripartite quantum steering with an optimal local filtering operation

Abstract

Multipartite Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering admits multipartite entanglement in the presence of uncharacterized verifiers, enabling practical applications in semi-device-independent protocols. Such applications generally require stronger steerability, while the unavoidable noise weakens steerability and consequently degrades the performance of quantum information processing. Here, we propose the local filtering operation that can maximally distill genuine tripartite EPR steering from N copies of three-qubit generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, in the context of two semi-device-independent scenarios. The optimal filtering operation is determined by the maximization of assemblage fidelity. Analytical and numerical results indicate the advantage of the proposed filtering operation when N is finite and the steerability of initial assemblages is weak. Experimentally, a proof-of-principle demonstration of two-copy distillation is realized with the optical system. The advantage of the optimal local filtering operation is confirmed by the distilled assemblage in terms of higher assemblage fidelity with perfectly genuine tripartite steerable assemblages, as well as the greater violation of the inequality to witness genuine tripartite steerable assemblages. Our results benefit the distillation of multipartite EPR steering in practice, where the number of copies of initial assemblages is generally finite.