The scenario of remote state preparation with shared correlated quantum state and one bit of forward communication [B. Dakic et al. Nature Physics 8, 666-670 (2012)] is considered. The transmission efficiency is examined by considering general encoding and decoding strategies. The importance of use of linear fidelity is recognized. It is shown that separable states cannot exceed the efficiency of entangled states in this protocol. It is proven however that such a surprising phenomena may naturally occur when the decoding agent has limited resources in the sense that either (i) has no information about the coordinates in the sender plane being in question or (ii) is forced to use bistochastic operations only which may be imposed by physically inconvenient local thermodynamical conditions.
Entanglement distribution with separable states has recently attracted considerable attention. Recent results suggest that quantum discord - a measure for quantum correlations beyond entanglement - is responsible for this counterintuitive phenomenon. In this work we study this question from a different perspective, and find minimal requirements for a separable state to be useful for entanglement distribution. Surprisingly, we find that the presence of quantum discord is not sufficient to ensure entanglement distribution: there exist states with nonzero quantum discord which nevertheless cannot…
We propose an entanglement sharing protocol based on separable states. Initially, two parties, Alice and Bob, share a two-mode separable Gaussian state. Alice then splits her mode into two separable modes and distributes them between two players. Bob is separable from the players but he can create entanglement with either of the players if the other player moves to his location and collaborates with him. Any two parties are separable and the creation of entanglement is thus mediated by transmission of a mode which is separable from individual modes on Alice's and Bob's side. For the state shar…
It was shown that two distant particles can be entangled by sending a third particle never entangled with the other two [T. S. Cubitt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 037902 (2003)]. In this paper, we investigate a class of three-qubit separable states to distribute entanglement by the same way, and calculate the maximal amount of entanglement which two particles of separable states in the class can have after applying the way.
In this paper, we show that an arbitrary separable state can be the output of a certain entanglement-breaking channel corresponding exactly to the input of a maximally entangled state. A necessary and sufficient separability criterion and some sufficient separability criteria from entanglement-breaking channels are given.
We study how multi-partite entanglement evolves under the paradigm of separable operations, which include the local operations and classical communication (LOCC) as a special case. We prove that the average "decay" of entanglement induced by a separable operation is measure independent (among SL-invariant ones) and state independent: the ratio between the average output entanglement and the initial entanglement is solely a function of the separable operation, regardless of the input state and of the SL-invariant entanglement measure being used. We discuss the "disentangling power" of a quantum…
Absolutely separable states form a special subset of the set of all separable states, as they remain separable under any global unitary transformation unlike other separable states. In this work we consider the set of absolutely separable bipartite states and show that it is convex and compact in any arbitrary dimensional Hilbert space. Through a generic approach of construction of suitable hermitian operators we prove the completeness of the separation axiom for identifying any separable state that is not absolutely separable. We demonstrate the action of such witness operators in different q…
We investigate the physical mechanism behind the counterintuitive phenomenon, the distribution of continuous-variable entanglement between two distant modes by sending a third separable auxiliary mode between them. For this purpose, we propose a new more simple and more efficient protocol resulting in distributed entanglement with more than an order of the magnitude higher logarithmic negativity than in the previously proposed protocol. This new protocol shows that the distributed entanglement originates from the entanglement of one mode and the auxiliary mode used for distribution which is fi…
It has been showed that two entangle pure states can violate the bilocal inequality in the entanglement-swapping network, vice versa. What happens for mixed states? Whether or not are there separable mixed states violating the bilocal inequality? In the work, we devote to finding the mixed Werner states which violate the bilocal inequality by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms. Finally, we shows that there are pairs of states, where one is separable and the other is entangled, can violate the bilocal inequality.
The ability to reliably distribute entanglement among the nodes of a network is an essential requirement for the development of effective quantum communication protocols and the realization of useful quantum networks. It has been demonstrated, in different contexts, that two remote systems can be entangled via local interactions with a carrier system that always remains in a separable state with respect to such distant particles. We develop a strategy for entanglement distribution via separable carriers that can be applied to any number of network nodes to achieve various entanglement distribu…
One of the many bizarre features of entanglement is that Alice, by sending a qubit to Bob in a separable state, can generate some entanglement between herself and Bob. This protocol is stripped down to the bare essentials to better elucidate the key properties of the initial resource state that enable this entanglement distribution. The necessary and sufficient conditions under which the correlations of a Bell-diagonal state serve as a useful resource are proven, giving upper and lower bounds on the entanglement that can be distributed when those conditions are met.
We define a negative entanglement measure for separable states which shows that how much entanglement one should compensate the unentangled state at least for changing it into an entangled state. For two-qubit systems and some special classes of states in higher-dimensional systems, the explicit formula and the lower bounds for the negative entanglement measure have been presented, and it always vanishes for bipartite separable pure states. The negative entanglement measure can be used as a useful quantity to describe the entanglement dynamics and the quantum phase transition. In the transvers…
Like a silver thread, quantum entanglement [1] runs through the foundations and breakthrough applications of quantum information theory. It cannot arise from local operations and classical communication (LOCC) and therefore represents a more intimate relationship among physical systems than we may encounter in the classical world. The `nonlocal' character of entanglement manifests itself through a number of counterintuitive phenomena encompassing Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox [2,3], steering [4], Bell nonlocality [5] or negativity of entropy [6,7]. Furthermore, it extends our abilities to pr…
We prove experimentally the predicted existence of a three-qubit quantum state with genuine multipartite entanglement which can be certified solely from its separable two-qubit reduced density matrices. The qubits are encoded into different degrees of freedom of a pair of correlated photons and the state is prepared by letting the photons to propagate through a linear optical circuit. The presence of genuine multipartite entanglement is verified by finding numerically a fully decomposable entanglement witness acting nontrivially only on the reductions of the global state. Our result confirms v…
We investigate the joint (separable) numerical range of multiple measurements, i.e., the regions of expectation values accessible with (separable) quantum states for given observables. This not only enables efficient entanglement detection, but also sheds light on the geometry of the set of quantum states. More precisely, in an experiment, if the confidence region for the obtained data and the separable numerical range are disjoint, entanglement is reliably detected. Generically, the success of such an experiment is more likely the smaller the separable numerical range is compared to the stand…
We address the question of whether or not global entanglement of a quantum state can be inferred from local properties. Specifically, we are interested in genuinely multiparticle entangled states whose two-body marginals are all separable, but where the entanglement can be proven using knowledge of a subset of the marginals only. Using an iteration of semidefinite programs we prove that for any possible marginal configuration up to six particles multiqubit states with the desired properties can be found. We then present a method to construct states with the same properties for more particles i…
We investigate noise effects on the performance of entanglement distribution by separable state. We consider a realistic situation in which the mediating particle between two distant nodes of the network goes through a noisy channel. For a large class of noise models we show that the average value of distributed entanglement between two parties is equal to entanglement between particular bipartite partitions of target qubits and exchange qubit in intermediate steps of the protocol. This result is valid for distributing two qubit/qudit and three qubit entangled states. In explicit examples of t…
As two valuable quantum resources, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entanglement and steering play important roles in quantum-enhanced communication protocols. Distributing such quantum resources among multiple remote users in a network is a crucial precondition underlying various quantum tasks. We experimentally demonstrate the deterministic distribution of two- and three-mode Gaussian entanglement and steering by transmitting separable states in a network consisting of a quantum server and multiple users. In our experiment, entangled states are not prepared solely by the quantum server, but are creat…
We consider two bosonic Gaussian channels whose thermal noise is strong enough to break bipartite entanglement. In this scenario, we show how the presence of separable correlations between the two channels is able to restore the broken entanglement. This reactivation occurs not only in a scheme of direct distribution, where a third party (Charlie) broadcasts entangled states to remote parties (Alice and Bob), but also in a configuration of indirect distribution which is based on entanglement swapping. In both schemes, the amount of entanglement remotely activated can be large enough to be dist…
The distribution of entanglement between macroscopically separated parties represents a crucial protocol for future quantum information networks. Surprisingly, it has been theoretically shown that two distant systems can be entangled by sending a third mediating system that is not entangled with either of them. Such a possibility seems to contradict the intuition that to distribute entanglement, the transmitted system always needs to be entangled with the sender. Here, we experimentally distribute entanglement by exchanging a subsystem and successfully prove that this subsystem is not entangle…
The class of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) pertains to an important measurement scenario in many quantum communication schemes. While LOCC belongs to the more general class of separable operations (SEP), the exact difference between the two remains a challenging open problem. In this article, we seek to better understand the structure of LOCC and its relationship to SEP by comparing their respective abilities for distilling EPR entanglement from one copy of an $N$-qubit W-class state (i.e. that of the form $\sqrt{x_0}\ket{00...0}+\sqrt{x_1}\ket{10...0}+...+\sqrt{x_n}\ket{…
We present a general method to derive entanglement breaking (EB) conditions for continuous-variable quantum gates. We start with an arbitrary entanglement witness, and reach an EB condition. The resultant EB condition is applicable not only for quantum channels but also for general quantum operations, namely, trace-non-increasing class of completely positive maps. We illustrate our method associated with a quantum benchmark based on the input ensemble of Gaussian distributed coherent states. We also exploit our idea for channels acting on finite dimensional systems and present a Schmidt-number…
Three distant labs A, B and C, having no prior entanglement can establish a shared GHZ state, when one of them say A sends two particles to B and C for their local actions. The mediating particles remain separable from each other and from the particles of A, B and C. We prove that in this way, GHZ states are shared with a probability $\frac{1}{7}$. We also show how separable particles can be mediated to establish arbitrary $d-$ dimensional Bell states between distant labs. Our method is constructive and allows generaization of GHZ sharing between any number of parties and in any dimension. The…
The structural study of entanglement in multipartite systems is hindered by the lack of necessary and sufficient operational criteria able to discriminate among the various entanglement properties of a given mixed state. Here, we pursue a different route to the study of multipartite entanglement based on the closeness of a multipartite state to the set of separable ones. In particular, we analyze multipartite diagonal symmetric N qubit states and provide the analytical expression for their Best Separable Approximation (BSA [Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2261 (1998)]), that is, their unique convex decom…
We present several criteria for genuine multipartite entanglement from universal uncertainty relations based on majorization theory. Under non-negative Schur-concave functions, the vector-type uncertainty relation generates a family of infinitely many detectors to check genuine multipartite entanglement. We also introduce the concept of $k$-separable circles via geometric distance for probability vectors, which include at most $(k-1)$-separable states. The entanglement witness is also generalized to a universal entanglement witness which is able to detect the $k$-separable states more accurate…
Entanglement can be distributed using a carrier which is always separable from the rest of the systems involved. Up to now, this effect has predominantly been analyzed in the case where the carrier-system interactions take the form of ideal unitary operations, thus leaving untested its robustness against either non-unitary or unitary errors. We address this issue by considering the effect of incoherent dynamics acting alongside imperfect unitary interactions. In particular, we determine the restrictions that need to be placed on the interaction time, as well as the strength of the incoherent d…
Estimating the best separable approximation of non-pure spin-squeezed states
Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, Atominstitut, TU Wien（维也纳量子科学与技术中心，原子研究所，维也纳工业大学）；Departament de Física, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学物理系）；Naturwissenschaftlich-Technische Fakultät, Universität Siegen（锡根大学自然科学技术学院）
Nonlocality without entanglement (NLWE) is a nonlocal quantum phenomenon that arises in separable state discrimination. We show that the availability of the postmeasurement information about the prepared subensemble can affect the occurrence of NLWE in discriminating nonorthogonal nonentangled states. We provide a two-qubit state ensemble consisting of four nonorthogonal separable pure states and show that the postmeasurement information about the prepared subensemble can annihilate NLWE. We also provide another two-qubit state ensemble consisting of four nonorthogonal separable states and sho…
Quantum separable operations are defined as those that cannot produce entanglement from separable states, and it is known that they strictly surpass local operations and classical communication (LOCC) in a number of tasks, which is sometimes referred to as "quantum nonlocality without entanglement." Here we consider a task with such a gap regarding the trade-off between state discrimination and preservation of entanglement. We show that this task along with the gap has an analogue in a purely classical setup, indicating that the quantum properties are not essential in the existence of a nonzer…
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 review and generalize the recently introduced framework of entropy vectors for detecting and quantifying genuine multipartite entanglement in high dimensional multicomponent quantum systems. We show that these ideas can be extended to discriminate among other forms of multipartite entanglement. In particular, we develop methods to test whether density matrices are: decomposable, i.\ e.\ separable with respect to certain given partitions of the subsystems; $k$-separable, i.\ e.\ separable with respect to $k$ partitions of the subsystems; $k$-partite entangled, i.e. there is entanglement amon…
We present a large class of indecomposable exposed positive linear maps between three dimensional matrix algebras. We also construct two qutrit separable states with lengths ten in the interior of their dual faces. With these examples, we show that the length of a separable state may decrease strictly when we mix it with another separable state.
In the framework of the theory of open systems based on completely positive quantum dynamical semigroups, we give a description of the continuous-variable entanglement for a system consisting of two noninteracting modes embedded in a thermal environment. By using the Peres-Simon necessary and sufficient criterion for separability of two-mode Gaussian states, we describe the evolution of entanglement in terms of the covariance matrix for Gaussian input states. For all values of the temperature of the thermal reservoir, an initial separable Gaussian state remains separable for all times. In the …
We compare the classification as entangled or separable of Bell diagonal bipartite qudits with positive partial transposition (PPT) and their properties for different dimensions. For dimension $d \geq 3$, a form of entanglement exists that is hard to detect and called bound entanglement due to the fact that such entangled states cannot be used for entanglement distillation. Up to this date, no efficient solution is known to differentiate bound entangled from separable states. We address and compare this problem named separability problem for a family of bipartite Bell diagonal qudits with spec…
We introduce and explore two questions concerning spectra of operators that are of interest in the theory of entanglement in symmetric (i.e., bosonic) quantum systems. First, we investigate the inverse eigenvalue problem for symmetric entanglement witnesses -- that is, we investigate what their possible spectra are. Second, we investigate the problem of characterizing which separable symmetric quantum states remain separable after conjugation by an arbitrary unitary acting on symmetric space -- that is, which states are separable in every orthonormal symmetric basis. Both of these questions ha…
The key requirement for quantum networking is the distribution of entanglement between nodes. Surprisingly, entanglement can be generated across a network without direct transfer - or communication - of entanglement. In contrast to information gain, which cannot exceed the communicated information, the entanglement gain is bounded by the communicated quantum discord, a more general measure of quantum correlation that includes but is not limited to entanglement. Here, we experimentally entangle two communicating parties sharing three initially separable photonic qubits by exchange of a carrier …
