Quantum entanglement shared by remote network nodes serves as a valuable resource for promising applications in distributed computing, cryptography, and sensing. However, distributing high-quality entanglement via fiber-optic routes could be challenging due to the various decoherence mechanisms in fibers. In particular, one of the primary polarization decoherence mechanisms in optical fibers is polarization mode dispersion (PMD), which is the distortion of optical pulses by randomly varying birefringences. To mitigate the effect of decoherence in entangled particles, quantum entanglement distillation (QED) algorithms have been proposed. One particular class, the recurrence QED algorithms, stands out because it has relatively relaxed requirements both on the size of the quantum circuits involved and on the initial quality of entanglement between particles. However, because the number of required particles grows exponentially with the number of distillation rounds, an efficient recurrence algorithm needs to converge quickly. We present a recurrence QED algorithm designed for photonic qubit pairs affected by PMD-degraded channels. Our proposed algorithm achieves the optimal fidelity as well as the optimal success probability (conditioned on the fact that optimal fidelity is achieved) in every round of distillation. The attainment of the maximal fidelity improves the convergence speed of fidelity with respect to the number of distillation rounds from linear to quadratic and, hence, significantly reduces the number of rounds. Combined with the fact that the optimal success probability is achieved, the proposed algorithm provides an efficient method to distribute entangled states with a high fidelity via optical fibers.

• Received 4 October 2019
• Accepted 15 June 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.103.032425