An Efficient Scheme for Entanglement Concentration of Arbitrary Four-Photon States

The maximally entanglement will become less-entangled state because of the effects of decoherence. However, maximally entangled states are usually important for most of the quantum information processing protocols. So we propose a practical entanglement concentration protocol of an arbitrary four-photon less-entangled state assisted with single photons, which greatly reduces the difficulty of the experimental realization. In our scheme, we only employ three steps, a four-photon cluster state can be acquired with a certain probability by three affiliated photons. The protocol adopts the linear optical elements and weak cross-Kerr media, which make the scheme more simple and feasible in the experiment.