We introduce informationally complete measurements whose outcomes are entanglement witnesses and so answer the question of how many witnesses need to be measured to decide whether an arbitrary state is entangled or not: as many as the dimension of the state space. The witnesses can be measured successively; if all of them give an inconclusive result, one exploits their tomographic completeness for a reconstruction of the quantum state and can then determine its entanglement properties by data processing. There are witnesses that are optimal for this purpose. The optimized witness-based measurement can provide exponential improvement with respect to witness efficiency in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, at the price of a reduction in the tomographic efficiency. We describe a systematic construction and illustrate the matter with the example of two qubits. For the case of two polarization qubits of photons, we show how existing technology can be used to implement the optimized witnesses in a very efficient way. Owing to the details of the implementation, which actually measures the eigenstate basis of the witness rather than solely determining the expectation value of the witness, one does not need to measure more than six witnesses in this example of a 16-dimensional state space.
We introduce informationally complete measurements whose outcomes are entanglement witnesses and so answer the question of how many witnesses need to be measured to decide whether an arbitrary state is entangled or not: as many as the dimension of the state space. The witnesses can be measured successively; if all of them give an inconclusive result, one exploits their tomographic completeness for a reconstruction of the quantum state and can then determine its entanglement properties by data processing. There are witnesses that are optimal for this purpose. The optimized witness-based measurement can provide exponential improvement with respect to witness efficiency in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, at the price of a reduction in the tomographic efficiency. We describe a systematic construction and illustrate the matter with the example of two qubits. For the case of two polarization qubits of photons, we show how existing technology can be used to implement the optimized witnesses in a very efficient way. Owing to the details of the implementation, which actually measures the eigenstate basis of the witness rather than solely determining the expectation value of the witness, one does not need to measure more than six witnesses in this example of a 16-dimensional state space.
In this work, we present a practical and efficient framework for verifying entangled states when only a tomographically incomplete measurement setting is available-specifically, when access to observables is severely limited. We show how the experimental estimation of a small number of observables can be directly exploited to construct a large family of entanglement witnesses, enabling the efficient identification of entangled states. Moreover, we introduce an optimization approach, formulated as a semidefinite program, that systematically searches for those witnesses best suited to reveal entanglement under the given measurement constraints. We demonstrate the practicality of the approach in a proof-of-principle experiment with photon-polarization qubits, where entanglement is certified using only a fraction of the full measurement data. These results reveal the maximal usefulness of incomplete measurement settings for entanglement verification in realistic scenarios.
Abstract Entanglement is the powerful and enigmatic resource central to quantum information processing, which promises capabilities in computing, simulation, secure communication, and metrology beyond what is possible for classical devices. Exactly quantifying the entanglement of an unknown system requires completely determining its quantum state, a task which demands an intractable number of measurements even for modestly-sized systems. Here we demonstrate a method for rigorously quantifying high-dimensional entanglement from extremely limited data. We improve an entropic, quantitative entanglement witness to operate directly on compressed experimental data acquired via an adaptive, multilevel sampling procedure. Only 6, 456 measurements are needed to certify an entanglement-of-formation of 7.11 ± .04 ebits shared by two spatially-entangled photons. With a Hilbert space exceeding 68 billion dimensions, we need 20-million-times fewer measurements than the uncompressed approach and 1018-times fewer measurements than tomography. Our technique offers a universal method for quantifying entanglement in any large quantum system shared by two parties.
Whether entanglement in a state can be detected, distilled, and quantified without full state reconstruction is a fundamental open problem. We demonstrate a new scheme encompassing these three tasks for arbitrary two-qubit entanglement, by constructing the optimal entanglement witness for polarization-entangled mixed-state photon pairs without full state reconstruction. With better efficiency than quantum state tomography, the entanglement is maximally distilled by newly developed tunable polarization filters and quantified by the expectation value of the witness, which equals the concurrence. This scheme is extendible to multiqubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger entanglement.
Entanglement is the crucial resource in the field of quantum information processing and consequently a better understanding of its properties is very desirable. While for bipartite entangled qubit states many tools for characterization exist and also the experimental implementation of the tools is feasible, the situation for multipartite entangled states is different: The available tools have to be suited for a much greater diversity of entanglement properties, e.g. to analyze all the different entanglement classes [1]. A full experimental characterization via state tomography is increasingly difficult as the number of necessary measurement settings grows exponentially with the number of particles. In this contribution we focus on efficient, non-tomographic methods to characterize experimentally observed, multipartite entangled states. First steps towards this goal were demonstrated recently, for instance, for the proof of genuine multipartite entanglement [2] or for the analysis of the persistency of entanglement under loss [3]. Such methods can be further optimized by tailoring them to particular properties of states. We show how three important characteristic quantities, the fidelity, the non-separability and the permutation symmetry, can be evaluated with a significantly lower number of measurement settings than required for a complete tomography. Although the determination of these particular properties provides less information than the reconstruction of the complete density matrix, it allows to judge how well state characteristics are reproduced experimentally. This might be important with respect to an experimental application of states in quantum information. Exemplarily we apply the analysis tools to two genuinely four-qubit entangled states: the Dicke state with two excitations |D 4 〉 [4] and the cluster state |C4 〉 [5, 6]. These states are relevant for particular tasks: The state |D 4 〉 is a resource for telecloning [7], cluster states find an application in one-way quantum computation [6, 8] and are a subgroup of graph states, which play an important role for quantum error correction.
Abstract Entanglement is the powerful and enigmatic resource central to quantum information processing, which promises capabilities in computing, simulation, secure communication, and metrology beyond what is possible for classical devices. Exactly quantifying the entanglement of an unknown system requires completely determining its quantum state, a task which demands an intractable number of measurements even for modestly-sized systems. Here we demonstrate a method for rigorously quantifying high-dimensional entanglement from extremely limited data. We improve an entropic, quantitative entanglement witness to operate directly on compressed experimental data acquired via an adaptive, multilevel sampling procedure. Only 6,456 measurements are needed to certify an entanglement-of-formation of 7.11 ± .04 ebits shared by two spatially-entangled photons. With a Hilbert space exceeding 68 billion dimensions, we need 20-million-times fewer measurements than the uncompressed approach and 1018-times fewer measurements than tomography. Our technique offers a universal method for quantifying entanglement in any large quantum system shared by two parties.
Constructing optimal entanglement witnesses for arbitrary quantum systems remains a formidable challenge, hindered by the structural complexity of high-dimensional quantum state spaces. In this work, we overcome this barrier by introducing a unified framework for constructing geometrically optimal witnesses capable of identifying arbitrary entanglement structures. By leveraging the geometric properties of a target quantum state relative to a specific entanglement structure in Hilbert-Schmidt space, these witnesses are constructed in an efficient and effective manner. Among all nontrivial witnesses, they provide maximal distinguishability between the target state and the set of states without the desired entanglement structure. As a result, our approach enables the universal detection of bipartite, multipartite, and high-dimensional entanglement. To demonstrate its experimental feasibility, we apply the framework to a four-qubit nuclear spin quantum system. Compared to existing methods, our approach offers enhanced noise robustness, broader detection universality, and improved construction efficiency, providing a powerful and versatile tool for advancing the characterization and understanding of entanglement in quantum systems.