Entangled States are Harder to Transfer than Product States

The distribution of entangled states is a key task of utmost importance for many quantum information processing protocols. A commonly adopted setup for distributing quantum states envisages the creation of the state in one location, which is then sent to (possibly different) distant receivers through some quantum channels. While it is undoubted and, perhaps, intuitively expected that the distribution of entangled quantum states is less efficient than that of product states, a thorough quantification of this inefficiency (namely, of the difference between the quantum-state transfer fidelity for entangled and factorized states) has not been performed. To this end, in this work, we consider $n$-independent amplitude-damping channels, acting in parallel, i.e., each, locally, on one part of an $n$-qubit state. We derive exact analytical results for the fidelity decrease, with respect to the case of product states, in the presence of entanglement in the initial state, for up to four qubits. Interestingly, we find that genuine multipartite entanglement has a more detrimental effect on the fidelity than two-qubit entanglement. Our results hint at the fact that, for larger $n$-qubit states, the difference in the average fidelity between product and entangled states increases with increasing single-qubit fidelity, thus making the latter a less trustworthy figure of merit.