hide
Free keywords:
Quantum Physics, quant-ph
Abstract:
The distribution and processing of quantum entanglement form the basis of
quantum communication and quantum computing. The realization of the two is
difficult because quantum information inherently has a high susceptibility to
decoherence, i.e. to uncontrollable information loss to the environment. For
entanglement distribution, a proposed solution to this problem is capable of
fully eliminating decoherence; namely iterative entanglement distillation. This
approach builds on a large number of distillation steps each of which extracts
a number of weakly decohered entangled states from a larger number of strongly
decohered states. Here, for the first time, we experimentally demonstrate
iterative distillation of entanglement. Already distilled entangled states were
further improved in a second distillation step and also made available for
subsequent steps.Our experiment displays the realization of the building blocks
required for an entanglement distillation scheme that can fully eliminate
decoherence.