We study the entanglement distillability properties of thermal states of many-body systems. Following the ideas presented in [D.Cavalcanti et al., arxiv:0705.3762], we first discuss the appearance of bound entanglement in those systems satisfying an entanglement area law. Then, we extend these results to other topologies, not necessarily satisfying an entanglement area law. We also study whether bound entanglement survives in the macroscopic limit of an infinite number of particles.
We study entanglement distillability of bipartite mixed spin states under Wigner rotations induced by Lorentz transformations. We define weak and strong criteria for relativistic isoentangled and isodistillable states to characterize relative and invariant behavior of entanglement and distillability. We exemplify these criteria in the context of Werner states, where fully analytical methods can be achieved and all relevant cases presented.
We study the entanglement distillability of bipartite mixed states of two modes of a free Dirac field as seen by two relatively accelerated parties. It is shown that there are states that will change from distillable into separable for a certain value of acceleration. We exemplify these criteria in the context of Werner states.
We use Robust Semidefinite Programs and Entanglement Witnesses to study the distillability of Werner states. We perform exact numerical calculations which show 2-undistillability in a region of the state space which was previously conjectured to be undistillable. We also introduce bases which yield interesting expressions for the {\em distillability witnesses} and for a tensor product of Werner states with arbitrary number of copies.
We study the relation between violation of Bell inequalities and distillability properties of quantum states. Recently, Dür has shown that there are some multiparticle bound entangled states, non-separable and non-distillable, that violate a Bell inequality. We prove that for all the states violating this inequality there exist at least one splitting of the parties into two groups such that some pure-state entanglement can be distilled, obtaining a connection between Bell inequalities and bipartite distillable entanglement.
A necessary and sufficient condition for 1-distillability is formulated in terms of decomposable positive maps. As an application we provide insight into why all states violating the reduction criterion map are distillable and demonstrate how to construct such maps in a systematic way. We establish a connection between a number of existing results, which leads to an elementary proof for the characterisation of distillability in terms of 2-positive maps.
Genuineness and distillability of entanglement play a key role in quantum information tasks, and they are easily disturbed by the noise. We construct a family of multipartite states without genuine entanglement and distillability sudden death across every bipartition, respectively. They are realized by establishing the noise as the multipartite high dimensional Pauli channels. Further, we construct a locally unitary channel as another noise such that the multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state becomes the D{ü}r's multipartite state. We also show that the quantum information masking stil…
Entanglement and nonlocality are both fundamental aspects of quantum theory, and play a prominent role in quantum information science. The exact relation between entanglement and nonlocality is however still poorly understood. Here we make progress in this direction by showing that, contrary to what previous work suggested, quantum nonlocality does not imply entanglement distillability. Specifically, we present analytically a 3-qubit entangled state that is separable along any bipartition. This implies that no bipartite entanglement can be distilled from this state, which is thus fully bound e…
We construct a class of entangled states in $\mathcal{H}=\mathcal{H}_{A}\otimes\mathcal{H}_{B}\otimes\mathcal{H}_{C}$ quantum systems with $dim\mathcal{H}_{A}=dim\mathcal{H}_{B}=dim\mathcal{H}_{C}=2$ and classify those states with respect to their distillability properties. The states are bound entanglement for the bipartite split$(AB)-C$. The states are NPT entanglement and $1$-copy undistillable for the bipartite splits $A-(BC)$ and $B-(AC)$. Moreover, we generalize the results of $2\otimes2\otimes2$ systems to the case of $2n\otimes 2n\otimes2n$ systems.
There is an ongoing effort to quantify entanglement of quantum pure states for systems with more than two subsystems. We consider three approaches to this problem for three-qubit states: choosing a basis which puts the state into a standard form, enumerating ``local invariants,'' and using operational quantities such as the number of maximally entangled states which can be distilled. In this paper we evaluate a particular standard form, the {\it Schmidt form}, which is a generalization of the Schmidt decomposition for bipartite pure states. We show how the coefficients in this case can be para…
We present an inequality for detecting entanglement and distillability of arbitrary dimensional bipartite systems. This inequality provides a sufficient condition of entanglement for bipartite mixed states, and a necessary and sufficient condition of entanglement for bipartite pure states. Moreover, the inequality also gives a necessary and sufficient condition for distillability.
An important open problem in quantum information theory is the question of the existence of NPT bound entanglement. In the past years, little progress has been made, mainly because of the lack of mathematical tools to address the problem. (i) In an attempt to overcome this, we show how the distillability problem can be reformulated as a special instance of the separability problem, for which a large number of tools and techniques are available. (ii) Building up to this we also show how the problem can be formulated as a Schmidt number problem. (iii) A numerical method for detecting distillabil…
We present an abstract formulation of the so-called Innsbruck-Hannover programme that investigates quantum correlations and entanglement in terms of convex sets. We present a unified description of optimal decompositions of quantum states and the optimization of witness operators that detect whether a given state belongs to a given convex set. We illustrate the abstract formulation with several examples, and discuss relations between optimal entanglement witnesses and n-copy non-distillable states with non-positive partial transpose.
How the Hawking effect and the prepared states influence the entanglement distillability of Dirac fields in the Schwarzschild spacetime is studied by using the Werner states which are composed of the maximum or generic entangled states. It is found that the states are entangled when the parameter of the Werner states, $F$, satisfies $τ<F\leq 1$ in which $τ$ is influenced both by the Hawking temperature of the black hole and energy of the fields. It is also shown that although the parameter of the generic entangled states, $α$, affects the entanglement, it does not change the range of the param…
We present a lower bound of concurrence for arbitrary dimensional bipartite quantum states. This lower bound may be used to improve all the known lower bounds of concurrence. Moreover, the lower bound gives rise to an operational sufficient criterion of distillability of quantum entanglement. The significance of our result is illustrated by quantitative evaluation of entanglement for entangled states that fail to be identified by the usual concurrence estimation method, and by showing the distillability of mixed states that can not be recognized by other distillability criteria.
When a quantum system is distributed to spatially separated parties, it is natural to consider how the system evolves when the parties perform local quantum operations with classical communication (LOCC). However, the structure of LOCC channels is exceedingly complex leaving many important physical problems unsolved. In this paper we consider generalized resource theories of entanglement based on different relaxations to the class of LOCC. The behavior of various entanglement measures is studied under non-entangling channels, as well as the newly introduced classes of dually non-entangling and…
Entanglement distillation is a fundamental task in quantum information processing. It not only extracts entanglement out of corrupted systems but also leads to protecting systems of interest against intervention with environment. In this work, we consider a realistic scenario of entanglement distillation where noisy quantum operations are applied. In particular, the two-way distillation protocol that tolerates the highest error rate is considered. We show that among all types of noise there are only four equivalence classes according to the distillability condition. Since the four classes are …
We present a simple communication complexity problem where three parties benefit from sharing bound entanglement. This demonstrates that entanglement distillability of the shared state is not necessary in order to surpass classical communication complexity.
We obtain the necessary and sufficient separability and distillability conditions of mixtures of a maximally entangled state and the completely separable state in relativistic setting. In an inertial frame we study the entanglement under Wigner rotations induced by Lorentz transformations. We also investigate the mixed state entanglement of scalar and Dirac fields as seen by two relatively accelerated observers. For scalar field we show that in infinite acceleration limit the state has no longer distillable entanglement. For dirac field the entanglement in the infinite acceleration limit is fi…
We investigate asymptotic distillation of entanglement in the presence of an unlimited amount of bound entanglement for bi-partite systems. We show that the distillability is still bounded by the relative entropy of entanglement. This offers a strong support to the fact that bound entanglement does not improve distillation of entanglement.
Quantum entanglement plays a central role in many areas of physics, from quantum information science to many-body systems. In order to grasp the essence of this phenomenon, it is fundamental to understand how different manifestations of entanglement relate to each other. In 1999, Peres conjectured that Bell nonlocality is equivalent to distillability of entanglement. The intuition of Peres was that the non-classicality of an entangled state, as witnessed via Bell inequality violation, implies that pure entanglement can be distilled from this state, hence making it useful for most quantum infor…
It is known that he bipartite quantum states, with rank strictly smaller than the maximum of the ranks of its two reduced states, are distillable by local operations and classical communication. Our first main result is that this is also true for NPT states with rank equal to this maximum. (A state is PPT if the partial transpose of its density matrix is positive semidefinite, and otherwise it is NPT.) This was conjectured first in 1999 in the special case when the two local ranks are equal. Our second main result provides a complete solution of the separability problem for bipartite states of…
We consider the problem of existence of bound entangled states with non-positive partial transpose (NPT). As one knows, existence of such states would in particular imply nonadditivity of distillable entanglement. Moreover it would rule out a simple mathematical description of the set of distillable states. Distillability is equivalent to so called n-copy distillability for some n. We consider a particular state, known to be 1-copy nondistillable, which is supposed to be bound entangled. We study the problem of its two-copy distillability, which boils down to show that maximal overlap of some …
Within entanglement theory there are criteria which certify that some quantum states cannot be distilled into pure entanglement. An example is the positive partial transposition criterion. Here we present, for the first time, the analogous thing for secret correlations. We introduce a computable criterion which certifies that a probability distribution between two honest parties and an eavesdropper cannot be (asymptotically) distilled into a secret key. The existence of non-distillable correlations with positive secrecy cost, also known as bound information, is an open question. This criterion…
Two-copy distillability of one-copy-undistillable negative-partial-transpose states in every dimension
Hon Hai (Foxconn) Research Institute（鸿海（富士康）研究院）；Department of Physics and Center for Quantum Frontiers of Research & Technology (QFort), National Cheng Kung University（国立成功大学物理系与量子前沿研究与技术中心 (QFort)）
The distillability of bipartite entangled state as seen by moving observers has been investigated. It is found that the same initial entanglement for a state parameter $α$ and its "normalized partner" $\sqrt{1-α^2}$ will be degraded as seen by moving observer. It is shown that in the ultra relativistic limit, the state does not have distillable entanglement for any $α$.
Entanglement has recently been recognized as an energy resource which can outperform classical resources if decoherence is relatively low. Multi-atom entangled states can mutate irreversibly to so called bound entangled (BE) states under noise. Resource value of BE states in information applications has been under critical study and a few cases where they can be useful have been identified. We explore the energetic value of typical BE states. Maximal work extraction is determined in terms of ergotropy. Since the BE states are non-thermal, extracting heat from them is less obvious. We compare s…
We present here an overview of our work concerning entanglement properties of composite quantum systems. The characterization of entanglement, i.e. the possibility to assert if a given quantum state is entangled with others and how much entangled it is, remains one of the most fundamental open questions in quantum information theory. We discuss our recent results related to the problem of separability and distillability for distinguishable particles, employing the tool of witness operators. Finally, we also state our results concerning quantum correlations for indistinguishable particles.
We characterize the set of shared quantum states which contain a cryptographically private key. This allows us to recast the theory of privacy as a paradigm closely related to that used in entanglement manipulation. It is shown that one can distill an arbitrarily secure key from bound entangled states. There are also states which have less distillable private key than the entanglement cost of the state. In general the amount of distillable key is bounded from above by the relative entropy of entanglement. Relationships between distillability and distinguishability are found for a class of stat…
We discuss the relation between entanglement and nonlocality in the hidden nonlocality scenario. Hidden nonlocality signifies nonlocality that can be activated by applying local filters to a particular state that admits a local hidden-variable model in the Bell scenario. We present a fully-biseparable three-qubit bound entangled state with a local model for the most general (non-sequential) measurements. This proves for the first time that bound entangled states can admit a local model for general measurements. We furthermore show that the local model breaks down when suitable local filters ar…
Quantum steering, loosely speaking the distribution of entanglement from an untrusted party, is a form of quantum nonlocality which is intermediate between entanglement and Bell nonlocality. Determining which states can be steered is important from a conceptual point of view, but also for applications, e.g. in quantum cryptography. Here we show that bound entanglement, although it represents the weakest form of entanglement, can nevertheless lead to quantum steering. This is done by noticing that steering inequalities can be derived from entropic uncertainty relations. Our result has implicati…
It is shown that, if the loss of entanglement along a quantum channel is sufficiently small, then approximate quantum error correction is possible, thereby generalizing what happens for coherent information. Explicit bounds are obtained for the entanglement of formation and the distillable entanglement, and their validity naturally extends to other bipartite entanglement measures in between. Robustness of derived criteria is analyzed and their tightness compared. Finally, as a byproduct, we prove a bound quantifying how large the gap between entanglement of formation and distillable entangleme…
We study positive maps of B(K) into B(H) for finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces K and H. Our main emphasis is on how Choi matrices and estimates of their norms with respect to mapping cones reflect various properties of the maps. Special attention will be given to entanglement properties and k-positive maps, in particular tensor products of 2-positive maps. The latter problem is directly related to the question of n-copy distillability of quantum states, for which we obtain a partial result.
In the present article we investigate the efficacy of Dzyaloshisnhkii-Moriya (DM) interaction to convert the bound entangled states into free entangled states. Here we consider the tripartite hybrid system as a pair of non interacting two qutrits initially prepared in bound entangled states and one auxiliary qubit. The auxiliary qubit interacts with any one of the qutrit of the pair through DM interaction. It has been found that the DM interaction free the bound entangled states as time advances. In the present work we consider two types of bound entangled states investigated by Horodecki. Fur…
Among the possibly most intriguing aspects of quantum entanglement is that it comes in "free" and "bound" instances. Bound entangled states require entangled states in preparation but, once realized, no free entanglement and therefore no pure maximally entangled pairs can be regained. Their existence hence certifies an intrinsic irreversibility of entanglement in nature and suggests a connection with thermodynamics. In this work, we present a first experimental unconditional preparation and detection of a bound entangled state of light. We consider continuous-variable entanglement, use convex …
We investigate the decay of entanglement of generalized N-particle Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states interacting with independent reservoirs. Scaling laws for the decay of entanglement and for its finite-time extinction (sudden death) are derived for different types of reservoirs. The latter is found to increase with the number of particles. However, entanglement becomes arbitrarily small, and therefore useless as a resource, much before it completely disappears, around a time which is inversely proportional to the number of particles. We also show that the decay of multi-particle GHZ s…
Does bound entanglement naturally appear in quantum many-body systems? We address this question by showing the existence of bound-entangled thermal states for harmonic oscillator systems consisting of an arbitrary number of particles. By explicit calculations of the negativity for different partitions, we find a range of temperatures for which no entanglement can be distilled by means of local operations, despite the system being globally entangled. We offer an interpretation of this result in terms of entanglement-area laws, typical of these systems. Finally, we discuss generalizations of thi…
Motivated by the mathematical definition of entanglement we undertake a rigorous analysis of the separability and non-distillability properties in the neighborhood of those three-qubit mixed states which are entangled and completely bi-separable. Our results are not only restricted to this class of quantum states, since they rest upon very general properties of mixed states and Unextendible Product Bases for any possible number of parties. Robustness against noise of the relevant properties of these states implies the significance of their possible experimental realization, therefore being of …
We provide a class of bound entangled states that have positive distillable secure key rate. The smallest state of this kind is 4 \bigotimes 4. Our class is a generalization of the class presented in [1] (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 54, 2621 (2008); arXiv:quant-ph/0506203). It is much wider, containing, in particular, states from the boundary of PPT entangled states (all of the states in the class in [1] were of this kind) but also states inside the set of PPT entangled states, even, approaching the separable states. This generalization comes with a price: for the wider class a positive key rate r…
We address the presence of non-distillable (bound) entanglement in natural many-body systems. In particular, we consider standard harmonic and spin-1/2 chains, at thermal equilibrium and characterized by few interaction parameters. The existence of bound entanglement is addressed by calculating explicitly the negativity of entanglement for different partitions. This allows to individuate a range of temperatures for which no entanglement can be distilled by means of local operations, despite the system being globally entangled. We discuss how the appearance of bound entanglement can be linked t…
We prove that the entanglement entropy of any state evolved under an arbitrary $1/r^α$ long-range-interacting D-dimensional lattice spin Hamiltonian cannot change faster than a rate proportional to the boundary area for any $α>D+1$. We also prove that for any $α>2D+2$, the ground state of such a Hamiltonian satisfies the entanglement area law if it can be transformed along a gapped adiabatic path into a ground state known to satisfy the area law. These results significantly generalize their existing counterparts for short-range interacting systems, and are useful for identifying dynamical phas…
We argue that on its face, entanglement theory satisfies laws equivalent to thermodynamics if the theory can be made reversible by adding certain bound entangled states as a free resource during entanglement manipulation. Subject to plausible assumptions, we prove that this is not the case in general, and discuss the implications of this for the thermodynamics of entanglement.
Generic quantum states in the Hilbert space of a many body system are nearly maximally entangled whereas low energy physical states are not; the so-called area laws for quantum entanglement are widespread. In this paper we introduce the novel concept of entanglement susceptibility by expanding the 2-Renyi entropy in the boundary couplings. We show how this concept leads to the emergence of area laws for bi-partite quantum entanglement in systems ruled by local gapped Hamiltonians. Entanglement susceptibility also captures quantitatively which violations one should expect when the system become…
Because quantum measurements have probabilistic outcomes they can seem to violate conservation laws in individual experiments. Despite these appearances, strict conservation of momentum, orbital angular momentum, and energy can be shown to be consistent with the assumption that the entangling interactions that constitute measurements induce a real collapse of the wave function. The essential idea is that measured systems always have some pre-existing entanglement relations with (usually larger) systems, and that apparent changes in conserved quantities in the measured system are correlated wit…
We establish a relation between several entanglement properties in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model, which is a system of mutually interacting spins embedded in a magnetic field. We provide analytical proofs that the single-copy entanglement and the global geometric entanglement of the ground state close to and at criticality behave as the entanglement entropy. These results are in deep contrast to what is found in one- dimensional spin systems where these three entanglement measures behave differently.
Graph states form a rich class of entangled states that exhibit important aspects of multi-partite entanglement. At the same time, they can be described by a number of parameters that grows only moderately with the system size. They have a variety of applications in quantum information theory, most prominently as algorithmic resources in the context of the one-way quantum computer, but also in other fields such as quantum error correction and multi-partite quantum communication, as well as in the study of foundational issues such as non-locality and decoherence. In this review, we give a tutor…
We consider general locally-interacting arbitrary-dimensional lattice spin systems that are gapped for any system size. We show under reasonable conditions that nondegenerate ground states of such systems obey the entanglement area law. In so doing, we offer an intuitive picture on how a spectral gap restricts the correlations that a ground state can accommodate and leads to such a special feature.
We examine the evaluation of entanglement measures in weakly correlated gaussian states. It is shown that they can be expressed in terms of the singular values of a particular block of the generalized contraction matrix. This result enables to obtain in a simple way asymptotic expressions and related area laws for the entanglement entropy of bipartitions in pure states, as well as for the logarithmic negativity associated with bipartitions and also pairs of arbitrary subsystems. As illustration, we consider different types of contiguous and noncontiguous blocks in two dimensional lattices. Exa…
The out-of-equilibrium dynamics of many body systems has recently received a burst of interest, also due to experimental implementations. The dynamics of both observables, such as magnetization and susceptibilities, and quantum information related quantities, such as concurrence and entanglement entropy, have been investigated under different protocols bringing the system out of equilibrium. In this paper we focus on the entanglement entropy dynamics under a sinusoidal drive of the transverse magnetic field in the 1D quantum Ising model. We find that the area and the volume law of the entangle…
We review the theory of continuous-variable entanglement with special emphasis on foundational aspects, conceptual structures, and mathematical methods. Much attention is devoted to the discussion of separability criteria and entanglement properties of Gaussian states, for their great practical relevance in applications to quantum optics and quantum information, as well as for the very clean framework that they allow for the study of the structure of nonlocal correlations. We give a self-contained introduction to phase-space and symplectic methods in the study of Gaussian states of infinite-di…
