Abstract

Distributing high-quality entanglement between distant nodes is made possible in the unavoidable presence of decoherence by entanglement distillation. Current versions of this protocol are prohibitively costly in terms of resources. We introduce a new scheme for continuous-variable entanglement distillation that requires only linear temporal and constant physical or spatial resources, both exponential improvements over existing protocols. Our scheme uses a fixed module –- an entanglement distillery –- comprising only four quantum memories of at most 50 % storage efficiency and allowing a feasible experimental implementation. Tangible quantum advantages are obtainable using existing off-resonant Raman quantum memories outside their conventional role of storage. (Based on arXiv:1107.4122)