We construct triqubit genuinely entangled states which have positive partial transposes (PPTs) with respect to the bipartition of systems. These examples disprove a conjecture [Novo, Moroder, and G"uhne, Phys. Rev A 88, 012305 (2013)] which claims that PPT mixtures are necessary and sufficient for the biseparability of three qubits.
We consider the problem of characterizing genuine multiparticle entanglement for permutationally invariant states using the approach of positive partial transpose mixtures. We show that the evaluation of this necessary biseparability criterion scales polynomially with the number of particles. In practice, it can be evaluated easily up to ten qubits and improves existing criteria significantly. Finally, we show that our approach solves the problem of characterizing genuine multiparticle entanglement for permutationally invariant three-qubit states.
We solve the open question of the existence of four-qubit entangled symmetric states with positive partial transpositions (PPT states). We reach this goal with two different approaches. First, we propose a half-analytical--half-numerical method that allows us to construct multipartite PPT entangled symmetric states (PPTESSs) from the qubit-qudit PPT entangled states. Second, we adapt the algorithm allowing us to search for extremal elements in the convex set of bipartite PPT states [Phys. Rev. A 76, 034304 (2007)] to the multipartite scenario. With its aid we search for extremal four-qubit PPTESSs and show that generically they have ranks (5,7,8). Finally, we provide an exhaustive characterization of these states with respect to their separability properties.
Genuinely entangled subspaces are a class of subspaces in the multipartite Hilbert spaces that are composed of only genuinely entangled states. They are thus an interesting object of study in the context of multipartite entanglement. Here we provide a construction of multipartite subspaces that are not only genuinely entangled but also fully non-positive-partial-transpose (NPT) in the sense that any mixed state supported on them has non-positive partial transpose across any bipartition. Our construction originates from the stabilizer formalism known for its use in quantum error correction. To this end, we first introduce a couple of criteria allowing to assess whether any state from a given non-trivial stabilizer subspace is genuinely multipartite entangled. We then use these criteria to construct genuinely entangled stabilizer subspaces for any number of parties and arbitrary local dimension and conjecture them to be of maximal dimension achievable within the stabilizer formalism. At the same time, we prove that every genuinely entangled subspace is fully NPT in the above sense, which implies a quite surprising fact that no genuinely entangled stabilizer subspace can support PPT entangled states.
We construct three-qubit entanglement witnesses with the full spanning property, by which we mean that all the partial transposes have the spanning properties. These witnesses determine faces for separable states whose interior lies in the interior of positive partial transposes (PPT) states, and so they detect sets of PPT entangled states with nonempty interiors. These witnesses also detect fully bi-separable states as well as all kinds of bi-separable pure product states. Our construction depends on the observation that multi-partite entanglement witnesses correspond to positive multi-linear maps.
Abstract The relation between the distillability of entanglement of three bipartite reduced density matrices from a tripartite pure state has been studied in Hayashi and Chen [2011 Phys. Rev. A 84 012325]. We extend this result to the tripartite mixed state of rank at most three. In particular we show that if the state has two bipartite reduced density operators with rank two, then the third bipartite reduced density operator additionally having non positive partial transpose (non-PPT) is distillable. In contrast, we show that the tripartite PPT state with two reduced density operators of rank two is a three-qubit fully separable state. We obtain these facts by proving a conjectured matrix inequality for the bipartite matrix M with Schmidt rank at most three. This is one of the main results of this paper. We also prove it for some M with arbitrary Schmidt rank.