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arXiv:1106.4220 · Physical Review A

Entanglement classes of symmetric Werner states

David W. Lyons, Scott N. Walck

Published Oct 10, 2011• 6 citations
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Abstract

The symmetric Werner states for $n$ qubits, important in the study of quantum nonlocality and useful for applications in quantum information, have a surprisingly simple and elegant structure in terms of tensor products of Pauli matrices. Further, each of these states forms a unique local unitary equivalence class, that is, no two of these states are interconvertible by local unitary operations.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.042316

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The symmetric Werner states for nnn qubits, important in the study of quantum nonlocality and useful for applications in quantum information, have a surprisingly simple and elegant structure in terms of tensor products of Pauli matrices. Further, each of these states forms a unique local unitary equivalence class, that is, no two of these states are interconvertible by local unitary operations.
We classify, up to local unitary equivalence, local unitary stabilizer Lie algebras for symmetric mixed states of nnn qubits into six classes. These include the stabilizer types of the Werner states, the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state and its generalizations, and Dicke states. For all but the zero algebra, we classify entanglement types (local unitary equivalence classes) of symmetric mixed states that have those stabilizers. We make use of the identification of symmetric density matrices with polynomials in three variables with real coefficients and apply the representation theory of SO(3) on this space of polynomials.
Local operations assisted by classical communication (LOCC) play a fundamental role in the resource-theoretic formulation of entanglement theory inducing an operationally meaningful ordering in the set of entangled states. The particular class within LOCC of local unitary (LU) transformations is obviously closed under inversion. Thus, LU-equivalent states are interconvertible by LOCC and have therefore the same entanglement. For this reason LU-equivalence has been thoroughly studied in the context of entanglement theory. However, as I note here with a simple example, the converse is not true: there exist entangled states that are interconvertible by LOCC but which are not LU-equivalent. This motivates studying under which conditions LOCC interconvertibility is characterized by LU-equivalence. I provide a sufficient condition for this to hold. When one considers multipartite states with full entanglement dimensionality (as quantified by the Schmidt number vector) LOCC interconvertibility can only hold under LU-equivalence.
Quantum states that are symmetric with respect to permutations of their subsystems appear in a wide range of physical settings, and they have a variety of promising applications in quantum information science. In this thesis, the entanglement of symmetric multipartite states is categorized, with a particular focus on the pure multi-qubit case and the geometric measure of entanglement. An essential tool for this analysis is the Majorana representation, a generalization of the single-qubit Bloch sphere representation, which allows for a unique representation of symmetric n-qubit states by n points on the surface of a sphere. Here this representation is employed to search for the maximally entangled symmetric states of up to 12 qubits in terms of the geometric measure, and an intuitive visual understanding of the upper bound on the maximal symmetric entanglement is given. Furthermore, it will be seen that the Majorana representation facilitates the characterization of entanglement equivalence classes such as stochastic local operations and classical communication (SLOCC) and the degeneracy configuration (DC). It is found that SLOCC operations between symmetric states can be described by the Möbius transformations of complex analysis, which allows for a clear visualization of the SLOCC freedoms and facilitates the understanding of SLOCC invariants and equivalence classes. In particular, explicit forms of representative states for all symmetric SLOCC classes of up to five qubits are derived. Well-known entanglement classification schemes such as the four qubit entanglement families or polynomial invariants are reviewed in the light of the results gathered here, which leads to sometimes surprising connections. Some interesting links and applications of the Majorana representation to related fields of mathematics and physics are also discussed.
The necessary and sufficient conditions for the equivalence of arbitrary nnn-qubit pure quantum states under local unitary (LU) operations derived in [B. Kraus, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 020504 (2010)] are used to determine the different LU-equivalence classes of up to five-qubit states. Due to this classification new parameters characterizing multipartite entanglement are found and their physical interpretation is given. Moreover, the method is used to derive examples of two nnn-qubit states (with n>2n>2n>2 arbitrary) which have the properties that all the entropies of any subsystem coincide; however, the states are neither LU equivalent nor can be mapped into each other by general local operations and classical communication.
The first characterization of mixed-state entanglement was achieved for two-qubit states in Werner's seminal work [Phys. Rev. A 40, 4277 (1989)]. A physically important extension concerns mixtures of a pure entangled state [such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state] and the unpolarized state. These mixed states serve as benchmark for the robustness of multipartite entanglement. They share the symmetries of the GHZ state. We call such states GHZ symmetric. Here we give a complete description of the entanglement in the family of three-qubit GHZ-symmetric states and, in particular, of the three-qubit generalized Werner states. Our method relies on the appropriate parametrization of the states and on the invariance of entanglement properties under general local operations. An application is the definition of a symmetrization witness for the entanglement class of arbitrary three-qubit states.
Abstract We present two results on multiqubit Werner states, defined to be those states that are invariant under the collective action of any given single-qubit unitary that acts simultaneously on all the qubits. Motivated by the desire to characterize entanglement properties of Werner states, we construct a basis for the real linear vector space of Werner invariant Hermitian operators on the Hilbert space of pure states; it follows that any mixed Werner state can be written as a mixture of these basis operators with unique coefficients. Continuing a study of ‘polygon diagram’ Werner states constructed in earlier work, with a goal to connect diagrams to entanglement properties, we consider a family of multiqubit states that generalize the singlet, and show that their 2-qubit reduced density matrices are separable.