Towards the Classical Communication Complexity of Entanglement Distillation Protocols with Incomplete Information

Quantum entanglement distillation protocols are LOCC protocols between Alice and Bob that convert imperfect EPR pairs, or, in general, partially entangled bipartite states into perfect or near-perfect EPR pairs. The classical communication complexity of these protocols is the minimal amount of classical communication needed for the conversion. In this paper, we focus on the communication complexity of protocols that operate with incomplete information, i.e., where the inputs are mixed states and/or prepared adversarially. We study 3 models of imperfect EPR pairs. In the measure-r model, r out of n EPR pairs are measured by an adversary; in the depolarization model, Bob's share of qubits underwent a depolarization channel; in the fidelity model, the only information Alice and Bob possess is the fidelity of the shared state. For the measure-r model and the depolarization model, we prove tight and almost-tight bounds on the outcome of LOCC protocols that don't use communication. For the fidelity model, we prove a lower bound on the communication complexity that matches the upper bound given by Ambainis, Smith, and Yang [ASY02].