Experimental demonstration of one-shot coherence distillation: Realizing N-dimensional strictly incoherent operations

We experimentally investigate the one-shot distillation of quantum coherence, which focuses on the transformations froma single copy of a given state into maximally coherent states under various incoherent operations.We present a general proposal to realize a type of strictly incoherent operations (SIOs) that can act on N-dimensional .N ≥ 2/ states. This proposal is suitable for a variety of quantum devices. Based on a linear optical setup, we experimentally demonstrate that the proposed SIO successfully implements pure-to-pure state transformations, and thus the one-shot coherence distillation process is accomplished. The experimental data agree well with the theoretical results and clearly indicate the distillation fidelities, which bound the regions of different coherence distillation rates versus different superposition parameters of input states and different distillation errors.