Abstract Bipartite and multipartite entangled states are basic ingredients for constructing quantum networks and their accurate verification is crucial to the functioning of the networks, especially for untrusted networks. Here we propose a simple approach for verifying the Bell state in an untrusted network in which one party is not honest. Only local projective measurements are required for the honest party. It turns out each verification protocol is tied to a probability distribution on the Bloch sphere and its performance has an intuitive geometric meaning. This geometric picture enables us to construct the optimal and simplest verification protocols, which are also very useful to detecting entanglement in the untrusted network. Moreover, we show that our verification protocols can achieve almost the same sample efficiencies as protocols tailored to standard quantum state verification. Furthermore, we establish an intimate connection between the verification of Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger states and the verification of the Bell state. By virtue of this connection we construct the optimal protocol for verifying Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger states and for detecting genuine multipartite entanglement.
We study the verification of maximally entangled states by virtue of the simplest measurement settings: local projective measurements without adaption. We show that optimal protocols are in one-to-one correspondence with complex projective 2-designs constructed from orthonormal bases. Optimal protocols with minimal measurement settings are in one-to-one correspondence with complete sets of mutually unbiased bases. Based on this observation, optimal protocols are constructed explicitly for any local dimension, which can also be applied to estimating the fidelity with the target state and to detecting entanglement. In addition, we show that incomplete sets of mutually unbiased bases are optimal for verifying maximally entangled states when the number of measurement settings is restricted. Moreover, we construct optimal protocols for the adversarial scenario in which state preparation is not trusted. The number of tests has the same scaling behavior as the counterpart for the nonadversarial scenario; the overhead is no more than three times. We also show that the entanglement of the maximally entangled state can be certified with any given significance level using only one test as long as the local dimension is large enough.
We propose practical and efficient protocols for verifying bipartite pure states for any finite dimension, which can also be applied to fidelity estimation. Our protocols are based on adaptive local projective measurements with either one-way or two-way communications, which are very easy to implement in practice. They can extract the key information much more efficiently than known protocols based on tomography or direct fidelity estimation, and their efficiencies are comparable to the best protocols based on entangling measurements. These protocols highlight the significance of mutually unbiased bases and complex projective 2-designs in quantum state verification and fidelity estimation. Moreover, our protocols can be applied to the adversarial scenario, in which states are controlled by a malicious adversary. In this case, surprisingly, one of our protocols based on local measurements is even optimal among protocols without locality restriction.
Certifying multipartite entangled states is a basic task in quantum information processing, but the achievable copy complexity depends crucially on the measurements available to the verifier. The strongest possible certification measurement for a known pure target state
∣ψ⟩ is the two-outcome projector
{∣ψ⟩⟨ψ∣,I−∣ψ⟩⟨ψ∣}, which is copy-optimal but often experimentally unrealistic or outside the intended measurement model. In this work, we introduce BM-Cert, a single-copy verification protocol for the
n-qubit Greenberger--Horne--Zeilinger (GHZ) state using only disjoint two-qubit Bell-basis measurements, together with one single-qubit
X-basis measurement when
n is odd. Surprisingly, a simple combinatorial effect yields perfect completeness and a verification spectral gap
νBM(n)=1−O(1/n), so our depth-2 protocol already approaches the ideal projective verification asymptotically as
n grows. This contrasts with local Pauli GHZ verification, whose optimal spectral gap remains bounded away from
1. Thus, allowing only two-qubit entangling measurements on disjoint pairs is enough to achieve asymptotically ideal projective certification. The same Bell-matching outcomes also yield BM-Fid, an unbiased estimator of the GHZ fidelity whose leading Hoeffding coefficient in the sample complexity tends to the ideal value achieved by direct projection. For the open-boundary linear nearest neighbor setting, we further introduce Brick-Cert, a disjoint 2-local certification protocol whose spectral gap
4/5 is optimal within that restricted architecture.
Characterizing entanglement of systems composed of multiple particles is a very complex problem that is attracting increasing attention across different disciplines related to quantum physics. The task becomes even more complex when the particles have many accessible levels, i.e., they are of high dimension, which leads to a potentially high-dimensional multipartite entangled state. These are important resources for an ever-increasing number of tasks, especially when a network of parties needs to share highly entangled states, e.g., for communicating more efficiently and securely. For these applications, as well as for purely theoretical arguments, it is important to be able to certify both the high-dimensional and the genuine multipartite nature of entangled states, possibly based on simple measurements. Here we derive a novel method that achieves this and improves over typical entanglement witnesses like the fidelity with respect to states of a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) form, without needing more complex measurements. We test our condition on paradigmatic classes of high-dimensional multipartite entangled states like imperfect GHZ states with random noise, as well as on purely randomly chosen ones and find that, in comparison with other available criteria our method provides a significant advantage and is often also simpler to evaluate.
Genuine multipartite entanglement represents the strongest type of entanglement, which is an essential resource for quantum information processing. Standard methods to detect genuine multipartite entanglement, e.g., entanglement witnesses, state tomography, or quantum state verification, require full knowledge of the Hilbert space dimension and precise calibration of measurement devices, which are usually difficult to acquire in an experiment. The most radical way to overcome these problems is to detect entanglement solely based on the Bell-like correlations of measurement outcomes collected in the experiment, namely, device independently. However, it is difficult to certify genuine entanglement of practical multipartite states in this way, and even more difficult to quantify it, due to the difficulty in identifying optimal multipartite Bell inequalities and protocols tolerant to state impurity. In this Letter, we explore a general and robust device-independent method that can be applied to various realistic multipartite quantum states in arbitrary finite dimension, while merely relying on bipartite Bell inequalities. Our method allows us both to certify the presence of genuine multipartite entanglement and to quantify it. Several important classes of entangled states are tested with this method, leading to the detection of genuinely entangled states. We also certify genuine multipartite entanglement in weakly entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, showing that the method applies equally well to less standard states.