The Rate of Optimal Purification procedures

Purification is a process in which decoherence is partially reversed by using several input systems which have been subject to the same noise. The purity of the outputs generally increases with the number of input systems, and decreases with the number of required output systems. We construct the optimal quantum operations for this task, and discuss their asymptotic behaviour as the number of inputs goes to infinity. The rate at which output systems may be generated depends crucially on the type of purity requirement. If one tests the purity of the outputs systems one at a time, the rate is infinite: this fidelity may be made to approach 1, while at the same time the number of outputs goes to infinity arbitrarily fast. On the other hand, if one also requires the correlations between outputs to decrease, the rate is zero: if fidelity with the pure product state is to go to 1, the number of outputs per input goes to zero. However, if only a fidelity close to 1 is required, the optimal purifier achieves a positive rate, which we compute.