Recently, two-photon six-qubit hyperentangled states were produced in experiment and they can improve the channel capacity of quantum communication largely. Here we present a scheme for the hyperentanglement purification of nonlocal two-photon systems in three degrees of freedom (DOFs), including the polarization, the first-longitudinal-momentum, and the second-longitudinal-momentum DOFs. Our hyperentanglement purification protocol (hyper-EPP) is constructed with two steps resorting to parity-check quantum nondemolition measurement on the three DOFs and swap gates, respectively. With these two steps, the bit-flip errors in the three DOFs can be corrected efficiently. Also, we show that using swap gates is a universal method for hyper-EPP in the polarization DOF and multiple-longitudinal-momentum DOFs. The implementation of our hyper-EPP is assisted by nitrogen-vacancy centers in optical microcavities, which could be achieved with current techniques. It is useful for long-distance high-capacity quantum communication with two-photon six-qubit hyperentanglement.

• Received 4 July 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.94.032319