Superadditivity of distillable entanglement from quantum teleportation

Abstract

We show that the phenomenon of superadditivity of distillable entanglement observed in multipartite quantum systems results from the consideration of states created during the execution of the standard end-to-end quantum teleportation protocol [and a few additional local operations and classical communication (LOCC) steps] on a linear chain of singlets. Some of these intermediate states are tensor products of bound entangled (BE) states, and hence, by construction possess distillable entanglement, which can be unlocked by simply completing the rest of the LOCC operations required by the underlying teleportation protocol. We use this systematic approach to construct both new and known examples of superactivation of bound entanglement, and examples of activation of BE states using other BE states. A surprising outcome is the construction of noiseless quantum relay channels with no distillable entanglement between any two parties, except for that between the two end nodes.