Remote Entanglement Distribution - Barry Sanders

Authors: Barry C. Sanders [Calgary] and G. Gour [UC San Diego] Shared bipartite entanglement is a crucial shared resource for many quantum information tasks such as teleportation, entanglement swapping, and remote state preparation. In general different nodes of a quantum network share an entanglement resource, such as ebits, that are consumed during the task. In practice, generating entangled states is expensive, but here we establish a protocol by which a quantum network requires only a single supplier of entanglement to all nodes who, by judicious measurements and classical communication, provides the nodes with a unique pairwise entangled state independent of the measurement outcome. Furthermore, we extend this result to a chain of suppliers and nodes, which enables an operational interpretation of concurrence. In the special case that the supplier shares bipartite states with two nodes, and such states are pure and maximally entangled, our protocol corresponds to entanglement swapping. However, in the practical case that initial shared entanglement between suppliers and nodes involves partially entangled or mixed states, we show that general local operations and classical communication by all parties (suppliers and nodes) yields distributions of entangled states between nodes. In general a distribution of bipartite entangled states between any two nodes will include states that do not have the same entanglement; thus we name this general process remote entanglement distribution. In our terminology entanglement swapping with partially entangled states is a particular class of remote entanglement distribution protocols. Here we identify which distributions of states can or cannot be created by remote entanglement distribution. In particular we