English

Optimality of universal conclusive entanglement purification protocols

Quantum Physics 2025-09-12 v1

Abstract

Entanglement purification is essential for quantum technologies; yet, rigorous bounds on the success probability for universal protocols -- those requiring no prior knowledge about the input state -- have remained underexplored. We establish such fundamental limits for conclusive protocols distilling perfect Bell states from a pure two-qubit states by deriving the optimal success probability starting with: two copies of a state with known Schmidt basis, and four copies of a state with unknown Schmidt basis. We prove that a known protocol achieves these bounds, confirming its optimality. Crucially, universality imposes an inherent efficiency trade-off, yielding an average success probability of just 2/1052/105 over Haar measure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.09423,
  title  = {Optimality of universal conclusive entanglement purification protocols},
  author = {Alexandre C. Orthey and Aby Philip and Tulja Varun Kondra and Alexander Streltsov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.09423},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

5 pages + 2 pages of end matter, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:31:58.628Z