Entanglement concentration for W-type entangled coherent states

An entangled coherent state (ECS) is one type of entanglement, which is widely discussed in the application of quantum information processing (QIP). In this paper, we propose an entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) to distill the maximally entangled W-type ECS from the partially entangled W-type ECS. In the ECP, we adopt the balanced beam splitter (BS) to make the parity check measurement. Our ECP is quite different from the conventional ECPs. After performing the ECP, not only can we obtain the maximally entangled ECS with some success probability, but also we can increase the amplitude of the coherent state. Therefore, it is especially useful in long-distance quantum communication, if the photon loss is considered.