Experimental entanglement distillation of mesoscopic quantum states

The distribution of entangled states between distant parties in an optical network is crucial for the successful implementation of various quantum communication protocols such as quantum cryptography, teleportation and dense coding(1-3). However, owing to the unavoidable loss in any real optical channel, the distribution of loss-intolerant entangled states is inevitably afflicted by decoherence, which causes a degradation of the transmitted entanglement.

To combat the decoherence, entanglement distillation, a process of extracting a small set of highly entangled states from a large set of less entangled states, can be used(4-14). Here we report on the distillation of deterministically prepared light pulses entangled in continuous variables that have undergone non-Gaussian noise.

The entangled light pulses(15-17) are sent through a lossy channel, where the transmission is varying in time similarly to light propagation in the atmosphere. By using linear optical components and global classical communication, the entanglement is probabilistically increased.