Correlated Catalysis Removes the Strong Converse for Entanglement Distillation
Abstract
Entanglement distillation converts noisy shared quantum states into maximally entangled pairs using local operations and classical communication. The distillable entanglement ED determines the maximum asymptotic rate at which this process can be performed reliably. For several classes of quantum states, distillation above this rate obeys a strong converse: the fidelity with the target state vanishes asymptotically. Here we show that correlated catalysis removes the strong converse for every distillable bipartite state. Specifically, at any target rate R>ED, the optimal asymptotic fidelity is given by ED/R. Thus, although catalysis does not increase the maximum reliable distillation rate, it allows nonvanishing fidelity at every finite rate. Remarkably, this advantage persists even when the catalyst is returned exactly at every finite blocklength and the correlations between the output and catalyst vanish asymptotically. We further characterize the catalyst size required to sustain nonvanishing fidelity above the reliable distillation rate.
Related
- Static classical-quantum-entanglement trade-offs: an entropic converse and single-letter characterizations
- Universal Entanglement Distillation
- Connection of surface code patches based on entanglement distillation without postselection
- Exponential Entanglement Advantage in Sensing Correlated Noise
- Universal distillation of quantum entanglement
BibTeX
@misc{masajada2026correlated,
title = {{Correlated Catalysis Removes the Strong Converse for Entanglement Distillation}},
author = {Piotr Masajada and Aby Philip and Alexander Streltsov},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.03148},
eprint = {2611.03148},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03148},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Correlated Catalysis Removes the Strong Converse for Entanglement Distillation
AU - Piotr Masajada
AU - Aby Philip
AU - Alexander Streltsov
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.03148
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03148
AB - Entanglement distillation converts noisy shared quantum states into maximally entangled pairs using local operations and classical communication. The distillable entanglement E_D determines the maximum asymptotic rate at which this process can be performed reliably. For several classes of quantum states, distillation above this rate obeys a strong converse: the fidelity with the target state vanishes asymptotically. Here we show that correlated catalysis removes the strong converse for every distillable bipartite state. Specifically, at any target rate R>E_D, the optimal asymptotic fidelity is given by E_D/R. Thus, although catalysis does not increase the maximum reliable distillation rate, it allows nonvanishing fidelity at every finite rate. Remarkably, this advantage persists even when the catalyst is returned exactly at every finite blocklength and the correlations between the output and catalyst vanish asymptotically. We further characterize the catalyst size required to sustain nonvanishing fidelity above the reliable distillation rate.
ER -