Entanglement concentration for arbitrary four-particle linear cluster states

Abstract Cluster states, whose model are a remarkably rich structure in measurement-based quantum computation, hold high degree of entanglement, while entanglement is very fragile during the process of transmission because of the inevitable interaction with the environment. We propose two entanglement concentration protocols for four-particle linear cluster states which and are susceptible to the decoherence and the imperfect communication setups. In the first protocol, POVM operators are introduced to maximize the success probability, and the second protocol is based on cross-Kerr nonlinearity which is utilized to check the parity between the original particle and the ancillary particle. Both of the protocols have their own advantages. The first one can be easily realized in experiment by linear optics, while the one with cross-Kerr nonlinearity reach more than 90% success probability by iteration. Since the wide application of cluster states, the two protocols are efficient and valuable to different fields of quantum communication.