Virtual entanglement distillation with quantum error mitigation*

A promising approach for scalable quantum computing involves distributed quantum computation, where small-scale remote devices are connected through entanglement typically generated using a photon interference effect. Since entanglement is susceptible to noise, entanglement distillation is often used to mitigate the impact of noise. However, this process frequently demands substantial resources and computational time. An alternative solution is a quasi-probability simulation using Schmidt decomposition with local operations and classical communication (LOCC), although this approach incurs significant sampling overheads.

In this work, we propose a complementary method that leverages quantum error mitigation through LOCC and classical post-processing to suppress errors in noisy entanglement. We introduce two methods: one is error-agnostic, based on virtual quantum error detection, and the other is error-aware, relying on probabilistic error cancellation.

Our findings demonstrate that the sampling overhead of our proposed methods is lower than that of Schmidt decomposition within a practical error range of noisy entanglement states.