A new tool for characterizing entanglement in many-body quantum systems offers a step toward creating true large-scale entanglement among many particles, which itself will be essential for practical quantum computing devices.
We present a method to detect entanglement partitions of multipartite quantum systems, by exploiting their inherent symmetries. Structures like genuinely multipartite entanglement, m-separability and entanglement depth are detected as very special cases. This formulation enables us to characterize all the entanglement partitions of all three- and four- partite states and witnesses with unitary and permutation symmetry. In particular, we find and parametrize a complete set of bound entangled states therein. For larger systems, we provide a large family of analytical witnesses detecting many-body states of arbitrary size where none of the parties is separable from the rest. This method relies on weak Schur sampling with projective measurements, and thus can be implemented in a quantum computer. Beyond physics, our results extend to the mathematical literature: we establish new inequalities between matrix immanants, and characterize the set of such inequalities for matrices of size three and four.
Entanglement is one of the most studied properties of quantum mechanics for its application in quantum information protocols. Nevertheless, detecting the presence of entanglement in large multipartite sates keeps being a great challenge both from the theoretical and the experimental point of view. Most of the known methods either have computational costs that scale inefficiently with the number of parties or require more information on the state than what is attainable in every-day experiments. We introduce a new technique for entanglement detection that provides several important advantages in these respects. First, its scales efficiently with the number of parties, thus allowing for application to systems composed by up to few tens of parties. Second, it needs only the knowledge of a subset of all possible measurements on the state, therefore being apt for experimental implementation. Moreover, since it is based on the detection of nonlocality, our method is device-independent. We report several examples of its implementation for well-known multipartite states, showing that the introduced technique has a promising range of applications.
Quantum science and engineering increasingly target the exploitation and control of large-scale dynamical systems. As system size grows, novel phenomena and quantum advantages emerge, but the resulting many-body dynamics become correspondingly harder to monitor and characterize. In particular, the underlying Hamiltonian often lacks symmetries, and the induced many-body dynamics quickly become hard to track. Focusing on one of the most important quantum features---entanglement---we demonstrate that, for a broad class of common Hamiltonian models, one can design effective witnesses that detect both the presence and structure of entanglement over relatively long evolution times. Inspired by stabilizer-based simulation, we track the evolution of generalized stabilizers of the underlying state and use them to construct linear entanglement witnesses. Through numerical experiments on Heisenberg-type Hamiltonians with up to twelve qubits, we show that the required number of measurement settings can be kept at a modest scale as the system size increases, and entanglement detection remains effective over evolution times that significantly exceed those accessible to naive approaches. The corresponding calculations can be carried out largely symbolically. Furthermore, unlike accurate state simulation, the stabilizer-based design of entanglement witnesses can be performed in a much more coarse-grained, digitized manner. We hope these results will stimulate further exploration of the quantum control of large systems.
Multipartite entanglement is one of the crucial resources in quantum information processing tasks such as quantum metrology, quantum computing and quantum communications. It is essential to verify not only the multipartite entanglement, but also the entanglement structure in both fundamental theories and the applications of quantum information technologies. However, it is proved to be challenging to detect the entanglement structures, including entanglement depth, entanglement intactness and entanglement stretchability, especially for general states and large-scale quantum systems. By using the partitions of the tensor product space we propose a systematic method to construct powerful entanglement witnesses which identify better the multipartite entanglement structures. Besides, an efficient algorithm using semi-definite programming and a gradient descent algorithm are designed to detect entanglement structure from the inner polytope of the convex set containing all the states with the same entanglement structure. We demonstrate by detailed examples that our criteria perform better than other known ones. Our results may be applied to many quantum information processing tasks.
In the past decades, rapid advances in the experimental control of quantum systems have opened up unparalleled capabilities of engineering exotic quantum states. Nowadays, we may consider ourselves witnesses of a second quantum revolution as strongly correlated quantum matter is regularly created, on a daily basis, within the most diverse platforms, e.g. arrays of Rydberg atoms, ultra-cold atoms in optical lattices, superconducting qubits, trapped ions, and quantum dots. In this era, dubbed Noisy-Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, the effort in pursuing research for realizing quantum technologies with practical purposes, such as quantum computing, simulations, communication and metrology, has greatly accelerated, and we are just starting to experience the immense progress that could be achieved. The remarkable breakthrough we are facing builds upon seminal theoretical and experimental advances in quantum physics. The key achievements in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics have opened up the possibility of controlling, trapping, and measuring single atoms, one by one, with high accuracy and reliability. In parallel, from a theoretical point of view, the study of quantum entanglement and correlations has bridged AMO physics and quantum information with crucial proposals for the realization of universal quantum computers. In this context, entanglement has emerged as one of the key tools to characterize and to exploit quantum many-body systems for quantum information purposes. We will study quantum entanglement in several scenarios to investigate and probe complex quantum many-body systems. We will consider examples ranging from generic mixed states in equilibrium to out-of-equilibrium dynamics, with and without dissipation, and topologically non-trivial systems. The leitmotif of this work will be how entanglement and correlations can be exploited to characterize the many-body quantum state describing a physical system and how entanglement can be detected in an experimentally efficient manner.