It has remained an open question whether a genuinely unextendible product basis (GUPB) exists. We resolve this problem by constructing an explicit three-qutrit GUPB of cardinality fourteen in the smallest tripartite Hilbert space in which a GUPB can exist. Together with the nonexistence of three-qutrit GUPBs of cardinality less than fourteen, our construction proves that fourteen is the minimum cardinality. A padding procedure further extends the construction to all tripartite systems whose local dimensions are at least three. As applications, the normalized projector onto the thirteen-dimensional orthogonal complement of the three-qutrit GUPB is positive under partial transposition and bound entangled across every bipartition, while the GUPB exhibits strong quantum nonlocality without entanglement.
Quantum nonlocality is associated with the local indistinguishability of orthogonal states. Unextendible product basis (UPB), a widely used tool in quantum information, exhibits nonlocality, which is the powerful resource for quantum information processing. In this work, we extend the definitions of nonlocality and genuine nonlocality from states to operators. We also extend UPB to the notions of unextendible product operator basis, unextendible product unitary operator basis (UPUOB), and strongly UPUOB. We construct their examples and show the nonlocality of some strongly UPUOBs under local operations and classical communications. We study the phenomenon of these operators acting on quantum states. As an application, we distinguish the two-dimensional strongly UPUOB, which only consumes three ebits of entanglement. Our results imply that such UPUOBs exhibit nonlocality as UPBs, and the distinguishability of them requires entanglement resources.
Bound-entangled states with positive partial transpose (PPT) can exhibit quantum steering and Bell nonlocality, disproving the long-standing Peres conjecture and its stronger steering counterpart. These counterexamples, obtained through explicit constructions or numerical searches, raise the question of whether they share a common structural origin. We address this question in the low-rank regime by asking whether known counterexamples can be obtained, up to invertible local filtering, from the complement of an unextendible product basis (UPB). We find that the answer depends crucially on the local dimension. In
3⊗3, the rank-four structure of PPT entangled states implies that both the steerable PPT state of Moroder \textit{et al.} and the Bell-nonlocal PPT state of Vértesi and Brunner can be obtained from UPB-complement states under invertible local filtering. For three qubits, in contrast, rank-four states that are PPT across every bipartition are separable across each cut. Moreover, comparison of the product-vector structure of the relevant kernels shows that the known three-qubit Bell-nonlocal PPT states cannot be obtained by invertible local filtering from the complement of any three-qubit UPB. Going beyond rank four, we further show that a known rank-eight three-qutrit state, supported on the complement of a UPB and PPT across every bipartition, is genuinely multipartite entangled. These results show that UPBs provide a unifying structural origin for important low-rank PPT entangled states in
3⊗3, but that nonlocal bound entanglement is not, in general, a UPB phenomenon.