Noise Effects on Entanglement Distribution by Separable State

Abstract: We investigate noise effects on the performance of entanglement distribution by separable state. We consider a realistic situation in which the mediating particle between two distant nodes of the network goes through a noisy channel. For a large class of noise models we show that the average value of distributed entanglement between two parties is equal to entanglement between particular bipartite partitions of target qubits and exchange qubit in intermediate steps of the protocol. This result is valid for distributing two qubit/qudit and three qubit entangled states. In explicit examples of the noise family, we show that there exists a critical value of noise parameter beyond which distribution of distillable entanglement is not possible. Furthermore, we determine how this critical value increases in terms of Hilbert space dimension, when distributing $d$-dimensional Bell states.