Virtual quantum resource distillation

Understand

Distillation, or purification, is central to the practical use of quantum resources in noisy settings often encountered in quantum communication and computation.

• Conventionally, distillation requires using some restricted 'free' operations to convert a noisy state into one that approximates a desired pure state.
• Here, we propose to relax this setting by only requiring the approximation of the measurement statistics of a target pure state, which allows for additional classical postprocessing of the measurement outcomes.
• We show that this extended scenario, which we call virtual resource distillation, provides considerable advantages over standard notions of distillation, allowing for the purification of noisy states from which no resources can be distilled conventionally.