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arXiv:0704.0461 · Physical Review A

Entanglement increase from local interactions and not completely positive maps

Thomas F. Jordan, Anil Shaji, E. C. G. Sudarshan

Published Aug 16, 2007• 15 citations
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Abstract

Simple examples are constructed that show the entanglement of two qubits being both increased and decreased by interactions on just one of them. One of the two qubits interacts with a third qubit, a control, that is never entangled or correlated with either of the two entangled qubits, and is never entangled, but becomes correlated, with the system of those two qubits. The two entangled qubits do not interact, but their state can change from maximally entangled to separable or from separable to maximally entangled. Similar changes for the two qubits are made with a SWAP operation between one of the qubits and a control; then there are compensating changes of entanglement that involve the control. When the entanglement increases, the map that describes the change of the state of the two entangled qubits is not completely positive. The combination of two independent interactions that individually give exponential decay of the entanglement can cause the entanglement to not decay exponentially but, instead, go to zero at a finite time.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.76.022102

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Simple examples are constructed that show the entanglement of two qubits being both increased and decreased by interactions on just one of them. One of the two qubits interacts with a third qubit, a control, that is never entangled or correlated with either of the two entangled qubits, and is never entangled, but becomes correlated, with the system of those two qubits. The two entangled qubits do not interact, but their state can change from maximally entangled to separable or from separable to maximally entangled. Similar changes for the two qubits are made with a SWAP operation between one of the qubits and a control; then there are compensating changes of entanglement that involve the control. When the entanglement increases, the map that describes the change of the state of the two entangled qubits is not completely positive. The combination of two independent interactions that individually give exponential decay of the entanglement can cause the entanglement to not decay exponentially but, instead, go to zero at a finite time.
Entanglement can be understood as an extraordinary degree of correlation between states of quantum systems – a correlation that cannot be given an explanation in terms of something like a common cause. Entanglement can occur between two or more quantum systems, and the most interesting case is when these correlations occur between systems that are space-like separated, meaning that changes made to one system are immediately correlated with changes in a distant system even though there is no time for a signal to travel between them. In this case one says that quantum entanglement leads to non-local correlations, or non-locality. More precisely, entanglement can be defined in the following way. Consider two particles, A and B, whose (pure) states can be represented by the state vectors ψA and ψB. Instead of representing the state of each particle individually, one can represent the composite two-particle system by another wavefunction, Ψ AB. If the two particles are unentangled , then the composite state is just the tensor product of the states of the components: Ψ AB = ψ A ⊗ ψ B; the state is then said to be factorable (or separable). If the particles are entangled, however, then the state of the composite system cannot be written as such a product of a definite state for A and a definite state for B. This is how an entangled state is defined for pure states: a state is entangled if and only if it cannot be factored: Ψ AB ≠ ψ A ⊗ ψ B.
We find that when a qubit initialized in a pure state experiences pure dephasing due to interaction with an environment, separable qubit-environment states generated during the evolution also have zero quantum discord with respect to the environment. What follows is that the set of separable states which can be reached during the evolution has zero volume, and hence, such effects as sudden death of qubit-environment entanglement are very unlikely. In the case of the discord with respect to the qubit, a vast majority of qubit-environment separable states is discordant, but in specific situations zero-discord states are possible. This is conceptually important since there is a connection between the discordance with respect to a given subsystem and the possibility of describing the evolution of this subsystem using completely positive maps. Finally, we use the formalism to find an exemplary evolution of an entangled state of two qubits that is completely positive, and occurs solely due to interaction of only one of the qubits with its environment (so one could guess that it corresponds to a local operation, since it is local in a physical sense), but which nevertheless causes the enhancement of entanglement between the qubits. While this simply means that the considered evolution is completely positive, but does not belong to local operations and classical communication, it shows how much caution has to be exercised when identifying evolution channels that belong to that class.
We consider two entangled qubits, each of which is coupled to its own reservoir, so that their entanglement degrades with time. To enhance the qubits' entanglement at a time during the evolution we propose a proper combination of pre- and postmeasurements to be performed locally on individual qubits. The premeasurements are weak measurements, but the postmeasurements may be either quantum measurement reversals or weak measurements again, depending on the situation at the time they are applied. Given the parameters of the initial qubits' state, the premeasurements' strength, and the evolution time, we establish the optimal conditions for the postmeasurements so that the qubits' entanglement becomes the largest possible. Actually, by our scheme, less entangled qubits can evolve into more entangled ones with a finite probability, or even into a near-maximally entangled state but with a vanishingly low probability. We also examine the entanglement distribution among different pairs of subsystems involved and find out that the pairwise concurrence dynamics in our scheme differs strikingly from that in the situation without any control actions.
Consider a bipartite quantum system S=AB such that each part interacts only with its local environment. Under such circumstances, one expects that the entanglement between parts A and B does not increase after the time evolution. In fact, this is the case if the reduced dynamics of the system is given by EA⊗EB\mathcal{E}_{A}\otimes \mathcal{E}_{B}EA​⊗EB​, where EA\mathcal{E}_{A}EA​ and EB\mathcal{E}_{B}EB​ are quantum channels, i.e., completely positive trace-preserving maps. But, the reduced dynamics of the system may be given by a map as ΨA⊗ΨBΨ_{A}\otimes Ψ_{B}ΨA​⊗ΨB​, where ΨAΨ_{A}ΨA​ and ΨBΨ_{B}ΨB​ are local non-positive maps. Then, the entanglement between A and B can exceed its initial value, as was shown in the case studied by Jordan et al. [Phys. Rev. A 76, 022102 (2007)]. In this paper, we first explore the general circumstances under which one can find such cases as they found. Next, we introduce another general procedure which leads to local non-positive maps that exhibit entanglement exceeding. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this apparent entanglement increase in the two above procedures corresponds physically to the retrieval of pre-existing inaccessible entanglement stored across the global system-environment degrees of freedom, rather than genuine generation of the entanglement ex nihilo\textit{ex nihilo}ex nihilo.
Entanglement-changing power of an arbitrary two-qubit operation, including increasing and decreasing power, is investigated in this paper. We consider the maximal entanglement Cmax{C}_{\mathrm{max}}Cmax​ and the minimal entanglement Cmin{C}_{\mathrm{min}}Cmin​ of the states obtained by a given two-qubit unitary operation Ud{U}_{d}Ud​ acting on arbitrary pure states with fixed entanglement C0{C}_{0}C0​. We give the condition that the maximal entanglement Cmax{C}_{\mathrm{max}}Cmax​ of the obtained states can be 111 and the minimal entanglement Cmin{C}_{\mathrm{min}}Cmin​ can be 000. When the maximal entanglement Cmax{C}_{\mathrm{max}}Cmax​ cannot be 111, we give the maximal value it can reach. When the minimal entanglement Cmin{C}_{\mathrm{min}}Cmin​ cannot be 000, we give the minimal value it can reach. We think Cmax{C}_{\mathrm{max}}Cmax​ and Cmin{C}_{\mathrm{min}}Cmin​ represent the entanglement-changing power of two-qubit unitary operations.