One-Shot Non-Catalytic Distributed Purity Distillation

Abstract: Pure states are an important resource in many quantum information processing protocols. However, even making a fixed pure state, say $|0\rangle$, in the laboratory requires a considerable amount of effort. Often one ends up with a mixed state $\rho$ whose classical description is nevertheless known. Hence it is important to develop protocols that extract a fixed pure state from a known mixed state. In this work, we study the problem of extracting a fixed pure state $|0\rangle^{A'} |0\rangle^{B'}$ from a known pure state $\rho^{AB}$ distributed between two parties $A$ and $B$. Here, $A'$, $B'$ are subspaces of $A$, $B$ and the total amount of purity extracted is $\log |A'| + \log |B'|$. The parties can borrow local pure ancilla, apply local unitary operations and send a message from $A$ to $B$ through a dephasing channel. If local pure ancilla is borrowed, it must be subtracted in order to properly account for the purity extracted. We obtain the most efficient achievable bounds on one shot distributed purity extraction, in terms of the rate of local ancilla borrowed by the protocol, while distilling pure qubits at the best known rate. Our protocols borrow little to no local pure ancilla. Our bounds improve upon the existing bounds for this problem in both one shot as well as asymptotic iid settings. In particular they subsume all the asymptotic iid results of Devetak and Krovi-Devetak. In addition, we derive upper bounds for the rate of distillation in the one shot setting, which nearly match our achievable bounds.