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  • Open Access

Noise-robust one-copy distillation protocol for all distillable Bell-diagonal qutrits

Tobias C. Sutter1,*, Christopher Popp1,†, and Beatrix C. Hiesmayr1,2,‡

  • *Contact author: tobias.christoph.sutter@univie.ac.at
  • †Contact author: christopher.popp@univie.ac.at
  • ‡Contact author: beatrix.hiesmayr@univie.ac.at
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Phys. Rev. A 114, 032430 – Published 14 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bgdw-3bln

Abstract

Entanglement distillation is the process of converting noisy entangled states into maximally entangled pure states via local operations and classical communication. A long-standing, unresolved question is which entangled states are amenable to distillation, known as the distillability problem. For Bell-diagonal qutrit states with a Weyl structure, combining two existing results shows that violating the positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion is both necessary and sufficient for one-copy distillability. However, these results do not identify a Schmidt-rank-2 witness that maximizes robustness to white noise. To address this limitation, we present a noise-robust entanglement-distillation scheme for all non-PPT Bell-diagonal qutrit states with a Weyl structure. Specifically, we construct a Schmidt-rank-2 eigenvector of the partially transposed density matrix associated with its unique, threefold degenerate negative eigenvalue. This feature makes the derived entanglement distillation protocol resilient to white-noise effects on the quantum states. Our results thus make noisy entangled qutrit pairs more accessible for future quantum technologies.

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Phys. Rev. A 114, 032430– Published 14 September, 2026
  • Received 28 April 2026
  • Accepted 25 August 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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