Inherent channel losses during photon transmission limit the efficiency of optical quantum communication. In this paper, we construct a hyperdistillation scheme which can be used to distill the spatial-mode and polarization states of a photon simultaneously from photon loss in a heralded strategy. Exploiting linear-optical devices, the fidelity of a single-photon two qubit in a lossy signal mode can be increased to one with a certain success probability. By using a four-photon entanglement resource, the success probability of the hyperdistillation operation could be improved. The proposed scheme provides a realistic solution to overcome the transmission losses and exhibits unique properties, which shows important applications to quantum information processing.

• Received 3 February 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.89.052303