Protecting entanglement from decoherence using weak measurement and quantum measurement reversal

Abstract

Decoherence, often caused by unavoidable coupling with the environment, leads to degradation of quantum coherence(1). For a multipartite quantum system, decoherence leads to degradation of entanglement and, in certain cases, entanglement sudden death(2,3). Tackling decoherence, thus, is a critical issue faced in quantum information, as entanglement is a vital resource for many quantum information applications including quantum computing(4), quantum cryptography(5), quantum teleportation(6-8) and quantum metrology(9). Here, we propose and demonstrate a scheme to protect entanglement from decoherence. Our entanglement protection scheme makes use of the quantum measurement itself for actively battling against decoherence and it can effectively circumvent even entanglement sudden death.