Entanglement is one of the essential resources in quantum information and communication technology (QICT). The entanglement thus far explored and applied to QICT has been pure and distillable entanglement. Yet there is another type of entanglement, called 'bound entanglement', which is not distillable by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We demonstrate the experimental 'activation' of the bound entanglement held in the four-qubit Smolin state, unleashing its immanent entanglement in distillable form, with the help of auxiliary two-qubit entanglement and LOCC. We anticipate that it opens the way to a new class of QICT applications that utilize more general classes of entanglement than ever, including bound entanglement.
We show that the usefulness of a state as an activator in teleportation protocols is equivalent to the robustness of its entanglement to noise. The robustness of entanglement of a bi-partite state is linked to the maximum increase in the the fidelity of teleportation of any other state when the former is used as an extra resource. On the one hand, this connection gives an operational meaning to the robustness of entanglement. On the other hand, it shows that the activation capability - which has a central role as an operational way of quantifying bound entangled states - can be estimated exper…
We consider multiple entanglement swappings performed on a chain of bipartite states. Each state does not violate CHSH inequality. We show that before some critical number of entanglement swappings is achieved the output state does not violate this inequality either. However, if this number is achieved then for some results of Bell measurements obtained in the protocol of entanglement swapping the output state violates CHSH inequality. Moreover, we show that for different states we have different critical numbers for which CHSH inequality is activated.
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 entanglement and coherence are two fundamental features of nature, arising from the superposition principle of quantum mechanics. While considered as puzzling phenomena in the early days of quantum theory, it is only very recently that entanglement and coherence have been recognized as resources for the emerging quantum technologies, including quantum metrology, quantum communication, and quantum computing. In this work we study the limitations for the interconversion between coherence and entanglement. We prove a fundamental no-go theorem, stating that a general resource theory of sup…
We study the activation of entanglement in teleportation protocols. To this end, we a present derivation of the average fidelity of teleportation process with noisy classical channel for qudits. In our work we do not make any assumptions about the entangled states shared by communicating parties. Our result allows us to specify the minimum amount of classical information required to beat the classical limit when the protocol is based on the Bell measurements. We also compare average fidelity of teleportation obtained using noisy and perfect classical channel with restricted capacity. The most …
Entanglement shared among multiple parties presents complex challenges for the characterisation of different types of entanglement. One of the most fundamental insights is the fact that some mixed states can feature entanglement across every possible cut of a multipartite system yet can be produced via a mixture of states separable with respect to different partitions. To distinguish states that genuinely cannot be produced from mixing such partition-separable states, the term genuine multipartite entanglement was coined. All these considerations originate in a paradigm where only a single cop…
We propose an optomechanical setup where the activation of entanglement through the pre-availability of non-classical correlations can be demonstrated experimentally. We analyse the conditions under which the scheme is successful and relate them to the current experimental state of the art. The successful activation of entanglement embodies an interesting alternative to current settings for the revelation of fully mechanical nonclassicality.
Bound entanglement was shown to be activated [P. Horodecki \textit{et al.,} Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{82,} 1056 (1999)] in the sense that the entanglement of a spatially separated two-qutrit system can be increased with nonzero probability via a sufficiently large number of preshared bound-entangled states, local three-level controlled operations, and classical communications. Here, we present a local quantum Zeno scheme for activating bound entanglement which is based only on single-particle rotations and threshold measurements. In our scheme, neither a large number of bound-entangled states n…
Protocols for sharing genuine multipartite entanglement by employing copies of biseparable states
International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad（海德拉巴国际信息技术学院）；Harish-Chandra Research Institute（哈里什-钱德拉研究所）；Homi Bhabha National Institute（霍米·巴巴国立研究所）；VIT-AP University（维特-AP大学）
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）
Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy \cite{Nelson:McEvoy:2007} suggesting that word associations can display `spooky action at a distance behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. This paper presents a simple quantum model of a word association system. It is shown that a quantum model of word entanglement can recover aspects of both the Spreading Activation equation and the Spooky-activation-at-a-distance equation, both of which are used to model the activation level of words in human memory.
Quantum discord, and a number of related indicators, are currently raising a relentless interest as a novel paradigm of non-classical correlations beyond entanglement. Beside merely fundamental aspects, various works have shown that discord is a valuable -- so far largely unexplored -- resource in quantum information processing. Along this line, quite a striking scheme is {entanglement activation}. An initial amount of discord between two disentangled parties of a multipartite system affects the dynamics so as to establish entanglement across a bipartition, which would not arise otherwise. To …
Quantum Defect Analysis and Target-Orbit-Directed Correction via the Purpose-Oriented Framework: Applications to Entanglement Repairability and Teleportation Activation
Harbin Engineering University（哈尔滨工程大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
In [M. Piani et al., arXiv:1103.4032 (2011)] an activation protocol was introduced which maps the general non-classical (multipartite) correlations between given systems into bipartite entanglement between the systems and local ancillae by means of a potentially highly entangling interaction. Here, we study how this activation protocol can be used to entangle the starting systems themselves via entanglement swapping through a measurement on the ancillae. Furthermore, we bound the relative entropy of quantumness (a naturally arising measure of non-classicality in the scheme of Piani et al. abov…
We study general quantum correlations of continuous variable Gaussian states and their interplay with entanglement. Specifically, we investigate the existence of a quantum protocol activating all nonclassical correlations between the subsystems of an input bipartite continuous variable system, into output entanglement between the system and a set of ancillae. For input Gaussian states, we prove that such an activation protocol cannot be accomplished with Gaussian operations, as the latter are unable to create any output entanglement from an initial separable yet nonclassical state in a worst-c…
In quantum mechanics, observing is not a passive act. Consider a system of two quantum particles A and B: if a measurement apparatus M is used to make an observation on B, the overall state of the system AB will typically be altered. When this happens no matter which local measurement is performed, the two objects A and B are revealed to possess peculiar correlations known as quantum discord. Here we demonstrate experimentally that the very act of local observation gives rise to an activation protocol which converts discord into distillable entanglement, a stronger and more useful form of quan…
We show that bipartite quantum states of any dimension, which do not have a positive partial transpose, become 1-distillable when one adds an infinitesimal amount of bound entanglement. To this end we investigate the activation properties of a new class of symmetric bound entangled states of full rank. It is shown that in this set there exist universal activator states capable of activating the distillation of any NPPT state.
We introduce a formalism that connections entanglement witnesses and the distillation and activation properties of a state. We apply this formalism to two cases: First, we rederive the results presented in quant-ph/0104095 by Eggeling et al., namely that on copy of any bipartite state with non--positive partial transpose (NPPT) is either distillable, or activable. Second, we show that there exist three--partite NPPT states, with the property that two copies can neither be distilled, nor activated.
We analyze the existence of activable bound entangled states in multi-particle systems. We first give a series of examples which illustrate some different ways in which bound entangled states can be activated by letting some of the parties to share maximally entangled states. Then, we derive necessary conditions for a state to be distillable as well as to be activable. These conditions turn out to be also sufficient for a certain family of multi-qubit states. We use these results to explicitely to construct states displaying novel properties related to bound entanglement and its activation.
We consider Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering in the regime where the parties can perform collective measurements on many copies of a given shared entangled state. We derive a simple and efficient condition for guaranteeing that an entangled state is $k$-copy steerable. In particular we show that any two-qubit and qubit-qutrit entangled states is $k$-copy steerable. This allows us to discuss the effect of super-activation of steering, whereby an entangled state that is unsteerable (i.e., admits a local hidden state model) in the one-copy regime becomes $k$-copy steerable. We provide examples wi…
We show that the phenomenon of superadditivity of distillable entanglement observed in multipartite quantum systems results from the consideration of states created during the execution of the standard end-to-end quantum teleportation protocol (and a few additional local operations and classical communication (LOCC) steps) on a linear chain of singlets. Some of these intermediate states are tensor products of bound-entangled (BE) states, and hence, by construction possess distillable entanglement, which can be unlocked by simply completing the rest of the LOCC operations required by the underl…
The monogamy relation for quantum correlations is not satisfied by all measures for all multiparty quantum states. We prove that an arbitrary quantum state which is nonmonogamous for negativity will become monogamous if a finite number of copies of the same state is provided. We refer this as activation of nonmonogamous states. We also show that multiple copies of a state satisfy monogamy for negativity if it does so for a single copy. The results are true for all quantum states of an arbitrary number of parties. Moreover, we find that two different three-qubit pure states which individually v…
We discuss several aspects of multiparticle mixed state entanglement and its experimental detection. First we consider entanglement between two particles which is robust against disposals of other particles. To completely detect these kinds of entanglement, full knowledge of the multiparticle density matrix (or of all reduced density matrixes) is required. Then we review the relation of the separability properties of l-partite splittings of a state $ρ$ to its multipartite entanglement properties. We show that it suffices to determine the diagonal matrix elements of $ρ$ in a certain basis in or…
It is shown that entanglement witnesses constructed via the family of spectral conditions are decomposable, i.e. cannot be used to detect bound entanglement. It supports several observations that bound entanglement reveals highly non-spectral features.
We propose entanglement measures with asymptotic weak-monotonicity. We show that a normalized form of entanglement measures with the asymptotic weak-monotonicity are lower (upper) bound for the entanglement of cost (distillation).
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.
It is shown that Smolin four-qubit bound entangled states [Phys. Rev. A, 63 032306 (2001)] can maximally violate two-setting Bell inequality similar to standard CHSH inequality. Surprisingly this entanglement does not allow for secure key distillation, so neither entanglement nor violation of Bell inequalities implies quantum security. It is also pointed out how that kind of bound entanglement can be useful in reducing communication complexity.
The upper and lower bounds of entanglement of formation are given for two mode squeezed thermal state. The bounds are compared with other entanglement measure or bounds. The entanglement distillation and the relative entropy of entanglement of infinitive squeezed state are obtained at the postulation of hashing inequality.
We study various super-activation effects in the following zero-error communication scenario: One sender wants to send classical or quantum information through a noisy quantum channel to one receiver with zero probability of error. First we show that there are quantum channels of which a single use is not able to transmit classical information perfectly yet two uses can. This is achieved by employing entangled input states between different uses of the given channel and thus cannot happen for classical channels. Second we exhibit a class of quantum channel with vanishing zero-error classical c…
PhD thesis (University of York). The thesis covers in a unified way the material presented in quant-ph/0403073, quant-ph/0502040, quant-ph/0504160, quant-ph/0510035, quant-ph/0512012 and quant-ph/0603283. It includes two large review chapters on entanglement and distillation.
Entanglement Rényi-$α$ entropy is an entanglement measure. It generalizes the entanglement of formation, and they coincide when $α$ tends to 1. We derive analytical lower and upper bounds for the entanglement Rényi-$α$ entropy of arbitrary dimensional bipartite quantum systems. We also demonstrate the application our bound for some concrete examples. Moreover, we establish the relation between entanglement Rényi-$α$ entropy and some other entanglement measures.
The verification of quantum entanglement under the influence of realistic noise and decoherence is crucial for the development of quantum technologies. Unfortunately, a full entanglement characterization is generally not possible with most entanglement criteria such as entanglement witnesses or the partial transposition criterion. In particular, so called bound entanglement cannot be certified via the partial transposition criterion. Here we present the full entanglement verification of dephased qubit and qutrit Werner states via entanglement quasiprobabilities. Remarkably, we are able to reve…
Bound entanglement is the noisy entanglement which cannot be distilled to a singlet form. Thus it cannot be used alone for quantum communication purposes. Here we show that, nevertheless, the bound entanglement can be, in a sense, pumped into single pair of free entangled particles. It allows for teleportation via the pair with the fidelity impossible to achieve without support of bound entanglement. The result also suggests that the distillable entanglement may be not additive.
We study entanglement witnesses that can be constructed with regard to the geometrical structure of the Hilbert-Schmidt space, i.e. we present how to use these witnesses in the context of quantifying entanglement and the detection of bound entangled states. We give examples for a particular three-parameter family of states that are part of the \emph{magic simplex} of two-qutrit states.
We study the entanglement of formation for arbitrary dimensional bipartite mixed unknown states. Experimentally measurable lower and upper bounds for entanglement of formation are derived.
It is shown that if a mixed state can be distilled to the singlet form, it must violate partial transposition criterion [A. Peres, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 1413 (1996)]. It implies that there are two qualitatively different types of entanglement: ``free'' entanglement which is distillable, and ``bound'' entanglement which cannot be brought to the singlet form useful for quantum communication purposes. Possible physical meaning of the result is discussed.
We derive the lower and upper bounds on the entanglement of a given multipartite superposition state in terms of the entanglement of the states being superposed. The first entanglement measure we use is the geometric measure, and the second is the q-squashed entanglement. These bounds allow us to estimate the amount of the multipartite entanglement of superpositions. We also show that two states of high fidelity to one another do not necessarily have nearly the same q-squashed entanglement.
We study a dynamic process of disentanglement by considering the time evolution of bound entanglement for a quantum open system, two qutrits coupling to a common environment. Here, the initial quantum correlations of the two qutrits are characterized by the bound entanglement. In order to show the universality of the role of environment on bound entanglement, both bosonic and spin environments are considered. We found that the bound entanglement displays collapses and revivals, and it can be stable against small temperature and time change. The thermal fluctuation effects on bound entanglement…
An entanglement bound based on local measurements is introduced for multipartite pure states. It is the upper bound of the geometric measure and the relative entropy of entanglement. It is the lower bound of minimal measurement entropy. For pure bipartite states, the bound is equal to the entanglement entropy. The bound is applied to pure tripartite qubit states and the exact tripartite relative entropy of entanglement is obtained for a wide class of states.
We investigate non-locality distillation using measures of non-locality based on the Elitzur-Popescu-Rohrlich decomposition. For a certain number of copies of a given non-local correlation, we define two quantities of interest: (i) the non-local cost, and (ii) the distillable non-locality. We find that there exist correlations whose distillable non-locality is strictly smaller than their non-local cost. Thus non-locality displays a form of irreversibility which we term bound non-locality. Finally we show that non-local distillability can be activated.
We provide analytical lower and upper bounds for entanglement of formation for bipartite systems, which give a direct relation between the bounds of entanglement of formation and concurrence, and improve the previous results. Detailed examples are presented.
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 investigate the entanglement of assistance which quantifies capabilities of producing pure bipartite entangled states from a pure tripartite state. The lower bound and upper bound of entanglement of assistance are obtained. In the light of the upper bound, monogamy constraints are proved for arbitrary n-qubit states.
The squashed entanglement is a widely used entanglement measure that has many desirable properties. However, as it is based on an optimization over extensions of arbitrary dimension, one drawback of this measure is the lack of good algorithms to compute it. Here, we introduce a hierarchy of semidefinite programming lower bounds on the squashed entanglement.
