Superactivating bound entanglement in quantum networks via quantum Zeno dynamics and a novel algorithm for optimized Zeno evolution

Abstract

An arbitrary amount of entanglement shared among nodes of a quantum network might be nondistillable if the nodes lack the information on the entangled Bell pairs they share. Making such a system distillable, which is called the superactivation of bound entanglement (BE), was shown to be possible through systematic quantum teleportation between the nodes, requiring the implementation of controlled-gates scaling with the number of nodes. In this work, we show in two scenarios that the superactivation of BE is possible if nodes implement the proposed local quantum Zeno strategies based on only single qubit rotations and simple threshold measurements. In the first scenario we consider, we obtain a two-qubit distillable entanglement system as in the original superactivation proposal. In the second scenario, we show that superactivation can be achieved among the entire network of eight qubits in five nodes. In addition to obtaining all-particle distillable entanglement, the overall entanglement of the system in terms of the sum of bipartite cuts is increased. We also design a general algorithm with variable greediness for optimizing the QZD evolution tasks. Implementing our algorithm for the second scenario, we show that a significant improvement can be obtained by driving the initial BE system into a maximally entangled state. We believe our work contributes to quantum technologies from both practical and fundamental perspectives bridging nonlocality, bound entanglement and the quantum Zeno dynamics among a quantum network.