Protecting remote bipartite entanglement against amplitude damping by local unitary operations

Remote entanglement will inevitably decrease due to the interactions between quantum systems and their environments. Therefore protecting remote entanglement against decoherence is of great importance in realizing quantum communication and quantum comp utation. In this paper, we demonstrate that decoherence caused by weak-measurement-induced damping can be effectively suppressed by adding local unitary operation series on each qubit. The results show that the entanglement of the output state can approach that of the state before amplitude damping. The most distinct advantage of this entanglement protection scheme is that any unitary operation (except the identity operation) has this entanglement reversal effect on the amplitude-damped states. Furthermore, in each local unitary operation series, all the operations can be different from one other, and all the time intervals between any two adjacent operations can be different too. In addition, there is no need for the two remote users to synchronize their operations. Unlike most of the previous schemes, we do not assume the instantaneous local unitary operation, and each operation has a duration. All these advantages suggest that this remote entanglement protection scheme is much simpler and feasible than the previous ones, and we hope it can be implemented in the near future. Recently, Y. S. Kim et al. [Nat. Phys. 8, 117 (2012)] pointed out that "pre-weak measurement + amplitude damping + bit-flipping operation + post-weak measurement" can actively combat specific decoherence. By combing our proposal with Kim et al.'s scheme, the protection performance can be greatly improved by replacing the bit-flipping operation with an arbitrary rotational operation around the x axis, the number of the operations as well as the interval between any two adjacent operations all can be different, and the application range of the scheme can be greatly broadened.