Entanglement distillation by dissipation and continuous quantum repeaters.

Even though entanglement is very vulnerable to interactions with the environment, it can be created by purely dissipative processes. Yet, the attainable degree of entanglement is profoundly limited in the presence of noise sources. We show that distillation can also be realized dissipatively, such that a highly entangled steady state is obtained. The schemes put forward here display counterintuitive phenomena, such as improved performance if noise is added to the system. We also show how dissipative distillation can be employed in a continuous quantum repeater architecture, in which the resources scale polynomially with the distance.

Activating distillation with an infinitesimal amount of bound entanglement.

We show that bipartite quantum states of any dimension, which do not have a positive partial transpose (NPPT), become 1-distillable when one adds an infinitesimal amount of bound entanglement. To this end we investigate the activation properties of a new class of symmetric bound entangled states of full rank. It is shown that in this set there exist universal activator states capable of activating the distillation of any NPPT state. The result shows that even a small amount of bound entanglement can be useful for quantum information purposes.