Compact entanglement distillery using realistic quantum memories

We adopt the beam splitter model for losses to analyse the performance of a recent compact continuous-variable entanglement distillation protocol [Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 060502, (2012)] implemented using realistic quantum memories. We show that the decoherence undergone by a two-mode squeezed state while stored in a quantum memory can strongly modify the results of the preparatory step of the protocol. We find that the well-known method for locally increasing entanglement, phonon subtraction, may not result in entanglement gain when losses are taken into account. Thus, we investigate the critical number $m_c$ of phonon subtraction attempts from the matter modes of the quantum memory. If the …