Active quantum distillation

Quantum distillation is a modern technology to decrease the von Neumann entropy of a subsystem by coherent system dynamics. Here we propose an active quantum distillation protocol, in which a bang-bang theme is applied to actively control the coherent dynamics of our system in order to obtain a subsystem with the von Neumann entropy as low as possible. For a bipartite bosonic system, we derive the analytical expression of the entropy lower bound of one subsystem under any unitary transformation for mixed states with conservation of particles. The lower bound is validated by numerical simulations on the Bose-Hubbard model, where the coherent evolution is controlled by tuning one interaction term of the Hamiltonian. Our protocol can be used to decrease the entropy of one subsystem lower than the total bipartite state and increase the number of bosons or only distill out very few bosons in the subsystem.