Learning Quantum Entanglement Distillation with Noisy Classical Communications

Abstract: Quantum networking relies on the management and exploitation of entanglement. Practical sources of entangled qubits are imperfect, producing mixed quantum state with reduced fidelity with respect to ideal Bell pairs. Therefore, an important primitive for quantum networking is entanglement distillation, whose goal is to enhance the fidelity of entangled qubits through local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Existing distillation protocols assume the availability of ideal, noiseless, communication channels. In this paper, we study the case in which communication takes place over noisy binary symmetric channels. We propose to implement local processing through parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) that are optimized to maximize the average fidelity, while accounting for communication errors. The introduced approach, Noise Aware-LOCCNet (NA-LOCCNet), is shown to have significant advantages over existing protocols designed for noiseless communications.