Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 58 1 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Here is a tripartite Schmidt projection entanglement concentration protocol. For , set . Regrouping the local qubits of each party giveswhere counts ones. Alice performs a projective measurement of that count, without learning the individual string. The orthogonal projector for outcome is . By the Born rule, its probability and conditional pure state areAlice sends by classical communication; all three parties use local unitary operations to relabel the same ordered type class as . There are now equal common-label amplitudes. Measuring the individual qubits instead would have destroyed precisely this coherence.
To obtain an integer number of target GHZ states, choose . The following exact LOCC step handles type classes whose sizes are not powers of two. For every -element subset , Alice uses the Kraus operatorEvery label occurs in such subsets, proving on the occupied subspace. Thus this is a complete measurement in quantum mechanics. Each outcome has probability , and leaves the normalized pure state . After Alice communicates , all parties relabel its elements in the same order. Binary expansion of the labels then factors the state into exactly independent copies of the target GHZ state. Local extensions of these operations handle unused basis vectors and do not affect the protocol.
For example, taking gives an outcome-dependent yield without any failure branch. Since has a binomial distribution with parameters , the weak law of large numbers gives in probability. Stirling's formula, uniformly when stays away from zero and one, givesBy continuity of the binary entropy, in probability. The integer rounding and logarithmic correction have no first-order effect.
A fixed yield with success probability tending to one is also explicit. For sufficiently large , takeOn , the bounded derivative of the binary entropy in a neighborhood of the fixed and Stirling's formula give . Chebyshev's inequality bounds the complementary probability by . Abort there if necessary, and otherwise use the subset measurement in quantum mechanics with . ThusThis matches the first-order rate in part (i), with exact outputs on every successful forward branch. If , simply retain the original target copies; if is an endpoint, output zero target copies.