LAUSR

Abstract It has been shown that a nearly pure Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state could be distilled from a large (even infinite) number of GHZ-diagonal states that can be obtained by depolarizing general multipartite mixed states (non-GHZ-diagonal states) through sequences of (probabilistic) local operations and classical communications. We here demonstrate that perfect GHZ states can be extracted, with certain probabilities, from two copies of non-GHZ-diagonal mixed states when some conditions are satisfied. This result implies that it is not necessary to depolarize these entangled mixed states to the GHZ-diagonal type, and that they are better than GHZ-diagonal states for distillation of pure GHZ states. We find a wide class of multipartite entangled mixed states that fulfill the requirements. Moreover, we display that the obtained result can be applied to practical noisy environments, e.g., amplitude-damping channels. Our findings provide an important complementarity to conventional GHZ-state distillation protocols (designed for GHZ-diagonal states) in theory, as well as having practical applications.