Distillation of free entanglement from bound entangled states using weak measurements

Abstract

We propose a scheme for distillation of free bipartite entanglement from bipartite bound-entangled states. The crucial element of our scheme is an ancillary system that is coupled to the initial bound-entangled state via appropriate weak measurements. We show that in this protocol free entanglement can be always generated with nonzero probability by using a single copy of the bound-entangled state. We also derive a lower bound on the entanglement cost of the protocol, and conclude that, on average, applying weaker measurements results in relatively higher values of free entanglement as well as lower costs.