Entanglement Distillation for Mixed States Using Particle Statistics

We extend the idea of entanglement concentration protocol for pure states (Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 187903) to the case of entanglement distillation for mixed states. The scheme works only with particle statistics and local operations, without the need of any other interactions. We show that the maximally entangled state can be distilled out when the initial state is pure, otherwise the entanglement distilled depends on the off-diagonal element of density matrix of the initial state. Because of the requirement for density matrix, the entanglement distilled is always less than one, and this result is the same for both fermionic and bosonic particles. The distillation efficiency is a product of the diagonal elements of the initial state, it takes the maximum 50%, the same as that in the case for pure states.