Manipulation of tripartite-to-bipartite entanglement localization under quantum noises and its application to entanglement distribution

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of quantum noises on entanglement localization by taking an example of reducing a three-qubit Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state to a two-qubit entangled state. We consider, respectively, two types of quantum decoherence, i.e. amplitude-damping and depolarizing decoherence, and explore the best von Neumann measurements on one of three qubits of the triple GHZ state for making the amount of entanglement of the collapsed bipartite state be as large as possible. The results indicate that different noises have different impacts on entanglement localization, and that the optimal strategy for reducing a three-qubit GHZ state to a two-qubit one via local measurements and classical communications in the amplitude-damping case is different from that in the noise-free case. We also show that the idea of entanglement localization could be utilized to improve the quality of bipartite entanglement distributing through amplitude-damping channels. These findings might shed a new light on entanglement manipulations and transformations. (paper)