Compact continuous-variable entanglement distillation

We introduce a new scheme for continuous-variable entanglement distillation that requires only linear temporal and constant physical or spatial resources. Distillation is the process by which high-quality entanglement may be distributed between distant nodes of a network in the unavoidable presence of decoherence. The known versions of this protocol scale exponentially in space and doubly exponentially in time. Our optimal scheme therefore provides exponential improvements over existing protocols. It uses a fixed-resource module—an entanglement distillery—comprising only four quantum memories of at most 50% storage efficiency and allowing a feasible experimental implementation. Tangible quantum advantages are obtainable by using existing off-resonant Raman quantum memories outside their conventional role of storage.