We map the quantum entanglement problem onto the mathematically well-studied truncated moment problem. This yields a necessary and sufficient condition for separability that can be checked by a hierarchy of semidefinite programs. The algorithm always gives a certificate of entanglement if the state is entangled. If the state is separable, typically a certificate of separability is obtained in a finite number of steps and an explicit decomposition into separable pure states can be extracted.
We map the quantum entanglement problem onto the mathematically well-studied truncated moment problem. This yields a necessary and sufficient condition for separability that can be checked by a hierarchy of semidefinite programs. The algorithm always gives a certificate of entanglement if the state is entangled. If the state is separable, typically a certificate of separability is obtained in a finite number of steps and an explicit decomposition into separable pure states can be extracted.
A real symmetric matrix is separable if it can be written as a sum of Kronecker products of positive semidefinite matrices. This talk concerns how to check if a matrix is separable or not. We propose a numerical algorithm, based on Lasserre type semidefinite relaxations, for solving the question. To check the separability of a matrix, we construct a hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations. If it is not separable, we can get a mathematical certificate for that; if it is, we can get a decomposition for the separability. This is a joint work with Xinzhen Zhang.
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.
Although the quantum state of a many-body system (e.g, a system consisting of several atoms) is described in terms of its degrees of freedom, i.e., a large number of variables representing a point on the compact space of quantum states, there is usually a small number of parameters that can be actually measured experimentally. We show that the problem of deciding whether the underlying quantum state is entangled is equivalent to the problem of deciding whether the set of measured parameters are the moments of some measure defined over the compact space of states of the many-body system. By considering quantum entanglement of n identical atoms we arrive at the truncated moment problem defined for symmetric measures over a product of n copies of unit balls in R^d. We consider moments up to degree 2 since these are most readily available experimentally. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to the moment cone, which can be expressed via a linear matrix inequality (LMI) of size at most 2d+2, which is independent of n. We can convert the LMIs into a set of explicit semialgebraic inequalities giving necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the moment cone, and show that the two conditions approach each other in the limit of large n. The inequalities are derived via considering the dual cone of nonnegative polynomials, and its sum-of-squares (SOS) relaxation. We show that the SOS relaxation of the dual cone is asymptotically exact, and using symmetry reduction techniques (J. Pure Appl. Algebra 192, no. 1-3, 95, arXiv:1205.3102), it can be written as a small linear matrix inequality of size at most 2d+2, which is independent of n. For the cone of nonnegative polynomials we also prove an analogue of the half degree principle for globally nonnegative symmetric polynomials (J. Math. Anal. Appl. 284, no. 1, 174, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 216, no. 4, 850).
This brief review discusses the problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable or entangled. I describe an established approach to this problem that is based on the monogamy of entanglement, which is the observation that a pair of quantum systems that are strongly entangled must be uncorrelated with the rest of the world. Unentangled states on the other hand involve correlations that can be shared with many other parties. Checking whether a given quantum state is shareable involves constructing certain symmetric quantum state extensions and I discuss how to do this using a class of optimizations known as semidefinite programs. An attractive feature of this approach is that it generates explicit entanglement witnesses that can be measured to demonstrate the entanglement experimentally. In recent years analysis of this approach has greatly increased our understanding of the complexity of determining whether a given quantum state is entangled and this review aims to give a unified discussion of these developments. Specifically, I describe how to use finite quantum de Finetti theorems to prove that highly shareable states are nearly separable and use these results to understand the computational complexity of the problem. This article is part of a special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical devoted to '50 years of Bell's theorem'.
We provide a complete mathematical theory for the entanglement of mixtures of Dicke states. These quantum states form an important subclass of bosonic states arising in the study of indistinguishable particles. We introduce a tensor-based parametrization where the diagonal entries of these states are encoded as a symmetric tensor, enabling a direct translation between entanglement properties and well-studied convex cones of tensors. Our results bridge multipartite entanglement theory with semialgebraic geometry and the theory of completely positive and copositive tensors.
This dictionary maps separability to completely positive tensors, the PPT property to moment tensors, entanglement witnesses to copositive tensors, and decomposable witnesses to sum of squares tensors. Using this framework, we construct explicit PPT entangled states in three or more qutrits, disproving a recent conjecture. We establish that PPT entanglement exists for all multipartite systems with local dimension d >= 3 and n >= 3 parties. We also show that, for mixtures of Dicke states, the PPT condition with respect to the most balanced bipartition implies all other PPT conditions.
We further connect bosonic extendibility of mixtures of Dicke states to the duals of known hierarchies for non-negative polynomials, such as the ones by Reznick and Polya. We thus provide semidefinite programming relaxations for separability and entanglement testing in the Dicke subspace.
We consider the problem of separability of quantum channels via the Choi matrix representation given by the Choi-Jamio\l{}kowski isomorphism. We explore three classes of separability across different cuts between systems and ancillae, and we provide a solution based on the mapping of the coordinates of the Choi state (in a fixed basis) to a truncated moment sequence (tms) y. This results in an algorithm which gives a separability certificate using semidefinite programming. The computational complexity and the performance of it depend on the number of variables n in the tms and on the size of the moment matrix Mt(y) of order t. We exploit the algorithm to numerically investigate separability of families of two-qubit and single-qutrit channels; in the latter case we can provide an answer for examples explored earlier through the criterion based on the negativity N, a criterion which remains inconclusive for Choi matrices with N=0.