Efficient multipartite entanglement purification with the entanglement link from a subspace

We present an efficient multipartite entanglement purification protocol (MEPP) for N-photon systems in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state with parity-check detectors. It contains two parts. One is the conventional MEPP with which the parties can obtain a high-fidelity N-photon ensemble directly, similar to the MEPP with controlled-NOT gates. The other is our recycling MEPP in which the entanglement link is used to produce some N-photon entangled systems from entangled N'-photon subsystems (2 <= N' < N) coming from the instances which are just discarded in all existing conventional MEPPs. The entangled N'-photon subsystems are obtained efficiently by measuring the photons with potential bit-flip errors. With these two parts, the present MEPP has a higher efficiency than all other conventional MEPPs.