Experimental purification of coherent states -: art. no. 060301

We propose a scheme for optimal Gaussian purification of coherent states from several imperfect copies. The proposal is experimentally demonstrated for the case of two copies of a coherent state sent through independent noisy channels. Our purification protocol relies on only linear optics and an ancilla vacuum state, rendering this approach an interesting alternative to the more complex protocols of entanglement distillation and quantum error correction.