Non-asymptotic entanglement distillation

Abstract

Entanglement distillation, an essential quantum information processing task, refers to the conversion from multiple copies of noisy entangled states to a smaller number of highly entangled states. In this work, we study the non-asymptotic fundamental limits for entanglement distillation. We investigate the optimal tradeoff between the distillation rate, the number of prepared states, and the error tolerance. First, we derive the one-shot distillable entanglement under completely positive partial transpose preserving operations as a semidefinite program and demonstrate an exact characterization via the quantum hypothesis testing relative entropy. Second, we establish efficiently computable second-order estimations of the distillation rate for general quantum states. In particular, we provide explicit as well as approximate evaluations for various quantum states of practical interest, including pure states, mixture of Bell states, maximally correlated states and isotropic states.