We consider entanglement distillation under the assumption that the input states are allowed to be correlated among each other. We hence replace the usually considered independent and identically distributed hypothesis by the weaker assumption of merely having identical reductions. We find that whether a state is then distillable or not is only a property of these reductions, and not of the correlations that are present in the input state. This is shown by establishing an appealing relation between the set of copy-correlated undistillable states and the standard set of undistillable states: The former turns out to be the convex hull of the latter. As an example of the usefulness of our approach to the study of entanglement distillation, we prove a new activation result, which generalizes earlier findings: It is shown that for every entangled state σ and every k, there exists a copy-correlated k-undistillable state ρ such that σ⊗ρ is single-copy distillable. Finally, the relation of our results to the conjecture about the existence of bound entangled states with a nonpositive partial transpose is discussed.
We consider entanglement distillation under the assumption that the input states are allowed to be correlated among each other. We hence replace the usually considered independent and identically distributed hypothesis by the weaker assumption of merely having identical reductions. We find that whether a state is then distillable or not is only a property of these reductions, and not of the correlations that are present in the input state. This is shown by establishing an appealing relation between the set of copy-correlated undistillable states and the standard set of undistillable states: The former turns out to be the convex hull of the latter. As an example of the usefulness of our approach to the study of entanglement distillation, we prove a new activation result, which generalizes earlier findings: It is shown that for every entangled state σ and every k, there exists a copy-correlated k-undistillable state ρ such that σ⊗ρ is single-copy distillable. Finally, the relation of our results to the conjecture about the existence of bound entangled states with a nonpositive partial transpose is discussed.
We consider entanglement distillation under the assumption that the input states are allowed to be correlated among each other. We hence replace the usually considered independent and identically-distributed hypothesis by the weaker assumption of merely having identical reductions. We find that whether a state is then distillable or not is only a property of these reductions, and not of the correlations that are present in the input state. This is shown by establishing an appealing relation between the set of copy-correlated undistillable states and the standard set of undistillable states: The former turns out to be the convex hull of the latter. As an example of the usefulness of our approach to the study of entanglement distillation, we prove a new activation result, which generalizes earlier findings: it is shown that for every entangled state σ and every k, there exists a copy-correlated k-undistillable state ρ such that σ ⊗ ρ is single-copy distillable. Finally, the relation of our results to the conjecture about the existence of bound entangled states with a non-positive partial transpose is discussed. 1
We introduce a formalism that connects 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 Eggeling et al. (e-print quant-ph/0104095), namely, that one copy of any bipartite state with nonpositive partial transpose (NPPT) is either distillable, or activatable. Second, we show that there exist three-partite NPPT states, with the property that two copies can neither be distilled, nor activated.
Whether entanglement with a negative partial transpose (NPT) can be undistillable is a longstanding open problem. In the canonical family of DiVincenzo \textit{et al.}, the one-copy-undistillable region was conjectured to remain undistillable at all copy numbers. We refute this: in every dimension d≥3, one vertex of this region is two-copy distillable, via an explicit Schmidt-rank-two tight-frame witness. The separation persists on an open set, while other states in the same region are provably two-copy undistillable. Twirling our counterexample into Werner form makes it two-copy undistillable, so this standard reduction can erase finite-copy distillability.
We derive general upper bounds on the distillable entanglement of a mixed state under one-way and two-way local operations and classical communication (LOCC). In both cases, the upper bound is based on a convex decomposition of the state into “useful” and “useless” quantum states. By “useful,” we mean a state whose distillable entanglement is non-negative and equal to its coherent information (and thus given by a single-letter, tractable formula). On the other hand, “useless” states are undistillable, i.e., their distillable entanglement is zero. We prove that in both settings, the distillable entanglement is convex on such decompositions. Hence, an upper bound on the distillable entanglement is obtained from the contributions of the useful states alone, being equal to the convex combination of their coherent informations. Optimizing over all such decompositions of the input state yields our upper bound. The useful and useless states are given by degradable and antidegradable states in the one-way LOCC setting, and by maximally correlated and positive partial transpose (PPT) states in the two-way LOCC setting, respectively. We also illustrate how our method can be extended to quantum channels. Interpreting our upper bound as a convex roof extension, we show that it reduces to a particularly simple, non-convex optimization problem for the classes of isotropic states and Werner states. In the one-way LOCC setting, this non-convex optimization yields an upper bound on the quantum capacity of the qubit depolarizing channel that is strictly tighter than previously known bounds for large values of the depolarizing parameter. In the two-way LOCC setting, the non-convex optimization achieves the PPT-relative entropy of entanglement for both isotropic and Werner states.
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 distillability is presented and strong evidence is given that all 1-copy undistillable Werner states are also 4-copy undistillable. (iv) The same method is used to estimate the volume of distillable states, and the results suggest that bound entanglement is primarily a phenomenon found in low dimensional quantum systems. (v) Finally, a set of one parameter states is presented which we conjecture to exhibit all forms of distillability.
In this paper, existence of bound entangled states with nonpositive partial transpose (NPT) is considered. 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. The particular state, known to be 1-copy nondistillable and supposed to be bound entangled, is considered. The problem of its two-copy distillability, which boils down to show that maximal overlap of some projectorQwith Schmidt rank two states does not exceed 1/2 (called thehalf-property), is studied. First, it is shown that the maximum overlap can be attained on vectors that are not of the simple product form with respect to cut between two copies. Then, the problem in attacked twofold way: (a) the half-property is proved for some wide classes of Schmidt rank two states; (b) the overlap forallSchmidt rank two states is bounded from above bycA⊗I+I⊗BwithA,Btraceless 4 × 4 matrices, and TrAfA+ TrBfB=1/4.