In this paper, we consider the local unitary classification of the class of qudit bipartite mixed states for which no information can be obtained locally. These states are represented by symmetrical density matrices in which both tracial states are maximally mixed. Interestingly, this symmetry facilitates the local unitary classification of two-qubit states. However, the same formalism fails in the case of systems of higher dimensions. We consider a broader set of states by introducing a family of qudit bipartite mixed states with maximally mixed marginals. For this family of states, we determine several constants which are in variant under local unitary transformations so can be used for entanglement classification. Finally, we consider the two-qutrit case and in particular, a two-parameter family of states for which the local unitary classification is complete. We relate this classification to known entanglement measures such as purity and negativity.
We consider the problems of maximizing the entanglement negativity of X-form qubit-qutrit density matrices with (i) a fixed spectrum and (ii) a fixed purity. In the first case, the problem is solved in full generality whereas, in the latter, partial solutions are obtained by imposing extra spectral constraints such as rank deficiency and degeneracy, which enable a semidefinite programming treatment for the optimization problem at hand. Despite the technically motivated assumptions, we provide strong numerical evidence that threefold degenerate X states of purity
P reach the highest entanglement negativity accessible to arbitrary qubit-qutrit density matrices of the same purity, hence characterizing a sparse family of likely qubit-qutrit maximally entangled mixed states.
Consider a qubit-qutrit (
2×3) composite state space. Let $C(\{1}{2}I_2, \{1}{3}I_3)$ be a convex set of all possible states of composite system whose marginals are given by $\{1}{2}I_2$ and $\{1}{3}I_3$ in two and three dimensional spaces respectively. We prove that there exists no pure state in $C(\{1}{2}I_2, \{1}{3}I_3)$. Further we generalize this result to an arbitrary
m×n bipartite systems. We prove that for
m<n, no pure state exists in the convex set
C(ρA,ρB), for an arbitrary
ρA and rank of
ρB>m.
We study the extreme points of the convex set
C(ρ1,ρ2) of bipartite quantum states with fixed marginals
ρ1 and
ρ2. We construct extreme points in
(d,d+m) dimension, of rank
d+m, matching the highest possible value, for all
d≥3,
m>2d2−2d−2 (when
d=2,
m≥1). This proves the existence of extremal states with relatively large rank and also covers all the known examples. We further show that, in order to analyze the extreme points of
C(ρ1,ρ2), it is sufficient to study the special case
C(D1,D2), where the marginals are diagonal. Additionally, we observe that it is sufficient to consider
d1≤d2. Thus, our results show that apart from possibly a few finite cases, for each
d1, the maximal rank is achieved almost all times.
The existence of a maximally entangled pure state is a cornerstone result of entanglement theory that has paramount consequences in quantum information theory. A natural generalization of this property is to consider whether a notion of maximal entanglement is possible among all states with the same spectrum (where the aforementioned case of pure states corresponds to the particular choice in which the spectrum is a delta distribution, i.e., rank-1 states). Despite positive evidence in the past that such a notion might exist at least in the case of two-qubit states, it was recently shown in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 050202 (2024)] that the answer to the above question is negative. This reference proved this for particular choices of the spectrum in the case of rank-2 two-qubit density matrices. While this settles the problem in general, it still leaves open whether there are other choices of the spectrum outside the case of pure states where a maximally entangled state for a fixed spectrum might exist. In this work we extend this impossibility result to all rank-2 and rank-3 two-qubit states as well as for a large class of eigenvalue distributions in the case where the rank equals four.
Pure multiparticle quantum states are called absolutely maximally entangled if all reduced states obtained by tracing out at least half of the particles are maximally mixed. We provide a method to characterize these states for a general multiparticle system. With that, we prove that a seven-qubit state whose three-body marginals are all maximally mixed, or equivalently, a pure ((7,1,4))_{2} quantum error correcting code, does not exist. Furthermore, we obtain an upper limit on the possible number of maximally mixed three-body marginals and identify the state saturating the bound. This solves the seven-particle problem as the last open case concerning maximally entangled states of qubits.