Distillation of high-dimensional hyperentangled photons
Dan-Yang Chen, Ming Yang, Yuanqin Yu · Physical Review A · 2025
High-dimensional hyperentangled states, serving as crucial physical resources in quantum communication, have attracted significant attention due to their exceptional properties (e.g., higher information density) compared to conventional two-dimensional single-degree-of-freedom entanglement. However, practical quantum entanglement systems inevitably suffer from environmental interactions, resulting in their degradation into partially entangled pure states or even mixed states, thereby significantly compromising the efficiency and security of quantum communication. Consequently, improving entanglement preservation in noisy systems emerges as a pivotal challenge in realizing fault-tolerant quantum networks. We propose two universal distillation schemes based on local positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs) for single-copy $(2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4)$-dimensional hyperentangled photons. These schemes effectively suppress photon vacuum errors induced by transmission losses and are constructed using spatial-mode and polarization-based POVM measurements, respectively. Our results demonstrate that the spatial-mode-based scheme outperforms its polarization-based counterpart in terms of fidelity and success probability. Remarkably, we discover that with appropriate POVM parameters, the fidelity range of amplitude-damped noisy states can be expanded to cover almost all parameter spaces. Due to the universal applicability of POVM measurements, which require neither auxiliary entanglement nor complex detectors and operate on single copies of imperfect states in each purification round, our scheme provides an experimentally feasible solution for distilling high-dimensional hyperentangled photonic states.