We introduce a sequence of numerical tests that can determine the entanglement or separability of a state even when there is not enough information to completely determine its density matrix. Given partial information about the state in the form of linear constraints on the density matrix, the sequence of tests can prove that either all states satisfying the constraints are entangled or there is at least one separable state that satisfies them. The algorithm works even if the values of the constraints are only known to fall in a certain range. If the states are entangled, an entanglement witness is constructed and lower bounds on entanglement measures and related quantities are provided; if a separable state satisfies the constraints, a separable decomposition is provided to certify this fact.
We introduce a sequence of numerical tests that can determine the entanglement or separability of a state even when there is not enough information to completely determine its density matrix. Given partial information about the state in the form of linear constraints on the density matrix, the sequence of tests can prove that either all states satisfying the constraints are entangled or there is at least one separable state that satisfies them. The algorithm works even if the values of the constraints are only known to fall in a certain range. If the states are entangled, an entanglement witness is constructed and lower bounds on entanglement measures and related quantities are provided; if a separable state satisfies the constraints, a separable decomposition is provided to certify this fact.
Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.
We introduce a sequence of numerical tests that can determine the entanglement or separability of a state even when there is not enough information to completely determine its density matrix. Given partial information about the state in the form of linear constraints on the density matrix, the sequence of tests can prove that either all states satisfying the constraints are entangled, or that there is at least one separable state that satisfies them. The algorithm works even if the values of the constraints are only known to fall in a certain range. If the states are entangled, an entanglement witness is constructed and lower bounds on entanglement measures and related quantities are provided; if a separable state satisfies the constraints, a separable decomposition is provided to certify this fact.
We study the separability of bipartite quantum systems in arbitrary dimensions using the Bloch representation of their density matrix. This approach enables us to find an alternative characterization of the separability problem, from which we derive a necessary condition and sufficient conditions for separability. For a certain class of states the necessary condition and a sufficient condition turn out to be equivalent, therefore yielding a necessary and sufficient condition. The proofs of the sufficient conditions are constructive, thus providing decompositions in pure product states for the states that satisfy them. We provide examples that show the ability of these conditions to detect entanglement. In particular, the necessary condition is proved to be strong enough to detect bound entangled states.
With an aim to detect the genuine entanglement of a mixed state at the nearby pure state, we reflect a practicable approach concerning the construction of witness and express expectations to detect separable, bipartite states, and multiqubit entangled states. We introduce the related concept of the density matrix, multiqubit state, entangled state entanglement witness, etc. In addition, we give unambiguous definitions of separable states, entangled states, and genuinely entangled states. Therefore, we are able to detect the genuine entanglement of a mixed state at the nearby pure state employing the witness that is constructed for the multiqubit states.
The main topic of this compilation thesis is the investigation of multipartite entanglement of finite dimensional systems. We developed a numerical algorithm that detects if a multipartite state is entangled or separable in a finite number of steps of a semi-definite optimization task. This method is an extension of previously known semi-definite methods, which are inconclusive when the state is separable. In our case, if the state is separable, an explicit decomposition into a mixture of separable states can be extracted. This was achieved by mapping the entanglement problem onto the mathematically well studied truncated moment problem. Additionally, a new way of writing the partially transposed state for symmetric multi-qubit states was developed which simplifies many results previously known in entanglement theory. This new way of writing the partial transpose criterion unifies different interpretations and alternative formulations of the partial transpose criterion and it is also a part in the aforementioned semi-definite algorithm. The geometric properties of entangled symmetric states of two qubits were studied in detail: We could answer the question of how far a given pure state is from the convex hull of symmetric separable states, as measured by the Hilbert-Schmidt distance, by giving an explicit formula for the closest separable symmetric state. For mixed states we could provide a numerical upper and analytical lower bound for this distance. For a larger number of qubits we investigated the ball of absolutely classical states, i.e. symmetric multi-qubit states that stay separable under any unitary transformation. We found an analytical lower bound for the radius of this ball around the maximally mixed symmetric state and gave a numerical upper bound on this radius, by searching for an entangled state as close as possible to the maximally mixed symmetric state. The tensor representation of a symmetric multi-qubit state, or spin-j state, allowed us to study entanglement properties based on the spectrum of the tensor via tensor eigenvalues. The definiteness of this tensor relates to the entanglement of the state it represents and, hence, the smallest tensor eigenvalue can be used to detect entanglement. However, the tensor eigenvalues are more difficult to determine than the familiar matrix eigenvalues which made the investigation computationally more challenging. The relationship between the value of the smallest tensor eigenvalue and the amount of entanglement in the state was also investigated. It turned out that they are strongly correlated for small system sizes, i.e. for up to six qubits. However, to investigate this correlation we needed an independent way to gauge the amount of entanglement of a state and in order to do so we improved existing numerical methods to determine the distance of a state to the set of separable symmetric states, using a combination of linear and quadratic programming. The tensor representation of symmetric multi-qubit states was also used to formally define a new tensor class of regularly decomposable tensors that corresponds to the set of separable symmetric multi-qubit states.
We focus on determining the separability of an unknown bipartite quantum state $\ensuremath{\rho}$ by invoking a sufficiently large subset of all possible entanglement witnesses given the expected value of each element of a set of mutually orthogonal observables. We review the concept of an entanglement witness from the geometrical point of view and use this geometry to show that the set of separable states is not a polytope and to characterize the class of entanglement witnesses (observables) that detect entangled states on opposite sides of the set of separable states. All this serves to motivate a classical algorithm which, given the expected values of a subset of an orthogonal basis of observables of an otherwise unknown quantum state, searches for an entanglement witness in the span of the subset of observables. The idea of such an algorithm, which is an efficient reduction of the quantum separability problem to a global optimization problem, was introduced by [Ioannou et al., Phys. Rev. A 70, 060303(R)], where it was shown to be an improvement on the naive approach for the quantum separability problem (exhaustive search for a decomposition of the given state into a convex combination of separable states). The last section of the paper discusses in more generality such algorithms, which, in our case, assume a subroutine that computes the global maximum of a real function of several variables. Despite this, we anticipate that such algorithms will perform sufficiently well on small instances that they will render a feasible test for separability in some cases of interest (e.g., in $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}3$ dimensional systems).