Quantum change point and entanglement distillation

We study the quantum change point problem within the paradigm of local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Specifically, we consider a source that emits entangled pairs in a default state but undergoes mutation at some stage and begins producing an orthogonal entangled state. A sequence of entangled pairs prepared from such a source and shared between distant observers cannot be used for quantum information processing tasks as the identity of each entangled pair remains unknown. Assuming every point of a given sequence is equally likely to be the change point, including the possibility that no change occurs, we present a pretty-good LOCC protocol that identifies the change point and distills free entangled pairs. Next, we consider a variation of this problem where the source switches to an unknown entangled state that belongs to a known set. Here we show the local distinguishability of the collection of states, containing the default and all possible mutations, plays a crucial role: if they are locally distinguishable, the problem reduces to the previous one, but if not, one may still identify the mutated state, the change point, and distill entanglement, as we illustrate with a concrete example.