Entanglement sharing through noisy qubit channels: One-shot optimal singlet fraction

Maximally entangled states--a resource for quantum information processing--can only be shared through noiseless quantum channels, whereas in practice channels are noisy. Here we ask: Given a noisy quantum channel, what is the maximum attainable purity (measured by singlet fraction) of shared entanglement for single channel use and local trace preserving operations? We find an exact formula of the maximum singlet fraction attainable for a qubit channel and give an explicit protocol to achieve the optimal value. The protocol distinguishes between unital and nonunital channels and requires no local post-processing. In particular, the optimal singlet fraction is achieved by transmitting part of an appropriate pure entangled state, which is maximally entangled if and only if the channel is unital. A linear function of the optimal singlet fraction is also shown to be an upper bound on the distillable entanglement of the mixed state dual to the channel.