Advances in quantum entanglement purification

Since its discovery, the quantum entanglement becomes a promising resource in quantum communication and computation. However, the entanglement is fragile due to the presence of noise in quantum channels. Entanglement purification is a powerful tool to distill high quality entangled states from the low quality entangled states. In this review, we present an overview of entanglement purification, including the basic entanglement purification theory, the entanglement purification protocols (EPPs) with linear optics, EPPs with cross-Kerr nonlinearities, hyperentanglement EPPs, deterministic EPPs, and measurement-based EPPs. We also review experimental progress of EPPs in linear optics. Finally, we give the discussion on potential outlook for the future development of EPPs. This review may pave the way for practical implementations in future long-distance quantum communication and quantum network.