Practical distributed quantum information processing with LOCCNet
This work addresses the problem of protocol design in distributed quantum information for researchers and practitioners, offering incremental improvements through a machine learning-based approach.
The authors tackled the challenge of designing practical Local Operations and Classical Communication (LOCC) protocols for distributed quantum information processing by introducing LOCCNet, a machine learning framework, which discovered protocols with evident improvements, particularly for entanglement distillation with quantum states of interest.
Distributed quantum information processing is essential for building quantum networks and enabling more extensive quantum computations. In this regime, several spatially separated parties share a multipartite quantum system, and the most natural set of operations is Local Operations and Classical Communication (LOCC). As a pivotal part in quantum information theory and practice, LOCC has led to many vital protocols such as quantum teleportation. However, designing practical LOCC protocols is challenging due to LOCC's intractable structure and limitations set by near-term quantum devices. Here we introduce LOCCNet, a machine learning framework facilitating protocol design and optimization for distributed quantum information processing tasks. As applications, we explore various quantum information tasks such as entanglement distillation, quantum state discrimination, and quantum channel simulation. We discover protocols with evident improvements, in particular, for entanglement distillation with quantum states of interest in quantum information. Our approach opens up new opportunities for exploring entanglement and its applications with machine learning, which will potentially sharpen our understanding of the power and limitations of LOCC. An implementation of LOCCNet is available in Paddle Quantum, a quantum machine learning Python package based on PaddlePaddle deep learning platform.