Noise thresholds for entanglement purification

We consider the effects of gate noise on the operation of an entanglement purification protocol. We characterize the performance of the protocol by two measures, the minimum purifiable input state fidelity, and the maximum output state fidelity. Both these measures are a function of gate error rate. For sufficiently large gate error rate these two measures converge, defining a threshold on gate error rates. Numerically, we estimate this threshold to be $9.2\times 10^{-2}$, which is achievable with many present day experimental architectures. (This paper is written in an experimental rapid communication format).