Detectors in the laboratory are often unlike their ideal theoretical cousins. They have nonideal efficiencies, which may then lead to nontrivial implications. We show how it is possible to predict correct answers about whether a shared quantum state is entangled in spite of finite detector efficiencies, when the tool for entanglement detection is a nonlinear entanglement witness. We first consider the detection loophole for shared quantum states with nonpositive partial transpose. We subsequently find nonlinear witness operators for bound entangled states with positive partial transpose, and show how the detection loophole can be closed also in such instances.
Detectors in the laboratory are often unlike their ideal theoretical cousins. They have nonideal efficiencies, which may then lead to nontrivial implications. We show how it is possible to predict correct answers about whether a shared quantum state is entangled in spite of finite detector efficiencies, when the tool for entanglement detection is a nonlinear entanglement witness. We first consider the detection loophole for shared quantum states with nonpositive partial transpose. We subsequently find nonlinear witness operators for bound entangled states with positive partial transpose, and show how the detection loophole can be closed also in such instances.
Entangled states are undoubtedly an integral part of various quantum information processing tasks. On the other hand, absolutely separable states which cannot be made entangled under any global unitary operations are useless from the resource theoretic perspective, and hence, identifying non--absolutely separable states can be an important issue for designing quantum technologies. Here we report that nonlinear witness operators provide significant improvements in detecting non--absolutely separable states over their linear analogs, by invoking examples of states in various dimensions. We also address the problem of closing the detection loophole and we find the critical efficiency of detectors above which no fake detection of non--absolutely separable (non--absolutely positive partial transposed) states is possible.
Abstract Entanglement witnesses (EWs) are one of the most effective methods to detect entanglement. It is known that nonlinear EW provide better entanglement detection than their linear counterparts, in that the former detect a strictly larger subset of entangled states than the latter. Whether linear or nonlinear, the method is measurement-device dependent, so that imperfect measurements may cause false certification of entanglement in a shared state. Measurement-device-independent EW provide an escape from such measurement dependence of the entanglement detection for linear EW. Here we present measurement-device-independent nonlinear EW for non-positive partial transpose entangled states as well as for bound entangled states with positive partial transpose. Although the witness considered herein does not detect a larger set of entangled states than other nonlinear EW, it is more efficient in that it never leads to a false detection corresponding to wrong measurements. The constructed measurement-device-independent nonlinear EW certify the entanglement of the same sets of entangled states as their device-dependent parents do, and therefore are better than the linear EW, device-independent or otherwise.
There always exists an entanglement witness for every entangled quantum state. Negativity of the expectation value of an entanglement witness operator guarantees entanglement of the corresponding state, given that the measurement devices involved are perfect, i.e., the performed measurements actually constitute the witness operator for the state under consideration. In a realistic situation, there are two possible ways of measurements to drive the process away from the ideal one. First, wrong measurements may be performed, and, second, while the measurement operators are implemented correctly, the detection process may be noisy. Entanglement witnesses are prone to both of these imperfections. The concept of measurement-device-independent entanglement witnesses was introduced to remove the first problem. We analyze the ``detection loophole'' in the context of measurement-device-independent entanglement witnesses, which deal with the second problem of imprecise measurements. We obtain an upper bound, a threshold value, on the entanglement witness function in the measurement-device-independent entanglement witness scenario, below which entanglement is guaranteed for given nonideal detector efficiencies, that can involve both lost events and dark counts. We also present a threshold value on the function in the ``worst-case scenario'' where the threshold of the witness operator for guaranteeing entanglement assumes its maximal negative value.
We consider a possible detector-efficiency loophole in experiments that detect entanglement via the local measurement of witness operators. Here, only local properties of the detectors are known. We derive a general threshold for the detector efficiencies which guarantees that a negative expectation value of a witness is due to entanglement, rather than to erroneous detectors. This threshold depends on the local decomposition of the witness and its measured expectation value. For two-qubit witnesses, we find the local operator decomposition that is optimal with respect to closing the loophole.
Abstract We consider the problem of entanglement detection in the presence of faulty, potentially malicious detectors. A common—and, as of yet, the only—approach to this problem is to perform a Bell test in order to identify nonlocality of the measured entangled state. However, there are two significant drawbacks in this approach: the requirement to exceed a critical, and often high, detection efficiency, and much lower noise tolerance. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to this problem, which is resilient to the detection loophole and is based on the standard tool of entanglement witness. We discuss how the two main techniques to detection losses, namely the discard and assignment strategies, apply to entanglement witnessing. We demonstrate using the example of a two-qubit Bell state that the critical detection efficiency can be significantly reduced compared to the Bell test approach.
Entanglement detection is one of the important problems in quantum information theory. To deal with this problem, many entanglement detection criteria have been proposed. Among the proposed criteria, the detection of entanglement through witness operator (also known as linear entanglement witness (LEW) operator) may be considered as the most practical. Although the witness operator approach to detect entanglement is experimentally friendly, the construction of these operators is not a very simple task. Even if we are able to construct a LEW operator, our problem is not solved as it may either detect a few entangled states or not a single entangled state from a given family of entangled states. Thus, we need a constructive approach in order to tackle this type of problem. In this work, we provide a few constructions of the non-linear entanglement witnesses (NLEW) for d1⊗d2 dimensional system from any linear entanglement witness (LEW) operator. The advantage of these constructions is that, if a LEW is unable to detect any particular entangled state described by the density operator ρent then our construction of NLEW may detect the same entangled state ρent. Further, we have constructed NLEW operator that may detect not only a class of bipartite negative partial transpose entangled state (NPTES), but also positive partial transpose entangled state (PPTES). Moreover, we have shown that the constructed NLEW operators may be decomposed in terms of the tensor product of local observables and hence may be realizable in an experiment.