Enhancing and expanding remote photonic entanglement via local filtering operations

We present an entanglement distillation scheme for enhancing remote two-photon polarization entanglement of mixed states. Although the main idea of the current scheme is based on Gisin's work (Phys. Lett. A 210 (1996) 151 [21]), there are new advantages in our new scheme, which are guaranteed by the nondemolition measurement of photonic state and the re-distillation of the garbage states. This entanglement distillation scheme not only can enhance the remote entanglement of mixed states, but also can expand two-photon entangled states to four-photon entangled states. So this scheme is an apparently feasible way for preparing multi-photon entangled states. The main idea is based on the principle of the cross-Kerr nonlinearity and the parity-check measurements (a nondemolition measurement) on photonic states. Two distant users Alice and Bob first start with one shared but less entangled photon pair, and with the help of local auxiliary photons, parity-check measurements and classical communication they can get a four-photon highly entangled states with a high success probability. For the fail result, although the garbage state is less entangled than the initial one, there is still entanglement in it. So these garbage states can be re-collected and distilled again instead of being discarded. In this sense, we can see that this protocol has a high yield, and the fidelity (with respect to the Bell state) of the initial state is not required to be bigger than 1/2 (a common threshold of the standard entanglement purification theory). In addition, post-selection measurements on the entangled photons are not needed here because of the nondemolition measurement. The nondemolition character of the measurement allows further processing of the resulting states. These advantages make the current scheme more feasible within the current technology. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.