Entanglement is one of the strongest quantum correlation, and is a key ingredient in fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics and a resource for quantum technologies. While entanglement theory is well settled for distinguishable particles, there are five inequivalent approaches to entanglement of indistinguishable particles. We analyse the different definitions of indistinguishable particle entanglement in the light of the locality notion. This notion is specified by two steps: (i) the identification of subsystems by means of their local operators; (ii) the requirement that entanglement represent correlations between the above subsets of operators. We prove that three of the aforementioned five entanglement definitions are incompatible with any locality notion defined as above.
Entanglement is one of the strongest quantum correlation, and is a key ingredient in fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics and a resource for quantum technologies. While entanglement theory is well settled for distinguishable particles, there are five inequivalent approaches to entanglement of indistinguishable particles. We analyse the different definitions of indistinguishable particle entanglement in the light of the locality notion. This notion is specified by two steps: (i) the identification of subsystems by means of their local operators; (ii) the requirement that entanglement represent correlations between the above subsets of operators. We prove that three of the aforementioned five entanglement definitions are incompatible with any locality notion defined as above.
We study different notions of quantum correlations in multipartite systems of distinguishable and indistinguishable particles. Based on the definition of quantum coherence for a single particle, we consider two possible extensions of this concept to the many-particle scenario and determine the influence of the exchange symmetry. Moreover, we characterize the relation of multiparticle coherence to the entanglement of the compound quantum system. To support our general treatment with examples, we consider the quantum correlations of a collection of qudits. The impact of local and global quantum superpositions on the different forms of quantum correlations is discussed. For differently correlated states in the bipartite and multipartite scenarios, we provide a comprehensive characterization of the various forms and origins of quantum correlations.
The study of entanglement in systems composed of identical particles raises interesting challenges with far-reaching implications in both, our fundamental understanding of the physics of composite quantum systems, and our capability of exploiting quantum indistinguishability as a resource in quantum information theory. Impressive theoretical and experimental advances have been made in the last decades that bring us closer to a deeper comprehension and to a better control of entanglement. Yet, when it involves composites of indistinguishable quantum systems, the very meaning of entanglement, and hence its characterization, still finds controversy and lacks a widely accepted definition. The aim of the present paper is to introduce, within an accessible and self-contained exposition, the basic ideas behind one of the approaches advanced towards the construction of a coherent definition of entanglement in systems of indistinguishable particles, with focus on fermionic systems. We also inquire whether the corresponding tools developed for studying entanglement in identical-fermion systems can be exploited when analysing correlations in distinguishable-party systems, in which the complete information of the individual parts is not available. Further, we open the discussion on the broader problem of constructing a suitable framework that accommodates entanglement in the presence of generalized statistics. This article is part of the theme issue 'Identity, individuality and indistinguishability in physics and mathematics'.
We argue that in the case of identical particles the most natural identification of separability, that is of absence of non-classical correlations, is via the factorization of mean values of commuting observables. It thus follows that separability and entanglement depend both on the state and on the choice of observables and are not absolute notions. We compare this point of view with a recent novel approach to the entanglement of identical particles, which allows for the definition of an entanglement entropy from a suitably defined reduced particle density matrix, without the need of labelling the system constituents. We contrast this figure of merit with the aforementioned lack of an absolute notion of entanglement by considering few paradigmatic examples.
Here, we discuss a particle-based approach to deal with systems of many identical quantum objects (particles) that never employs labels to mark them. We show that it avoids both methodological problems and drawbacks in the study of quantum correlations associated with the standard quantum mechanical treatment of identical particles. The core of this approach is represented by the multiparticle probability amplitude, whose structure in terms of single-particle amplitudes we derive here by first principles. To characterize entanglement among the identical particles, this new method uses the same notions, such as partial trace, adopted for non-identical ones. We highlight the connection between our approach and second quantization. We also define spin-exchanged multipartite states which contain a generalization of W states to identical particles. We prove that particle spatial overlap plays a role in the distributed entanglement within multipartite systems and is responsible for the appearance of non-local quantum correlations.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Foundations of quantum mechanics and their impact on contemporary society'.
Entanglement plays a central role in numerous fields of quantum science. However, as one departs from the typical "Alice versus Bob" setting into the world of indistinguishable fermions, it is not immediately clear how the concept of entanglement is defined among these identical particles. Our endeavor to recover the notion of subsystems, or mathematically speaking, the tensor product structure of the Hilbert space, lead to two natural pictures of defining fermionic entanglement: the particle picture and the mode picture. In the particle picture, entanglement characterizes the deviation of a fermionic quantum state from the non-interacting ones, e.g., single Slater determinants. In the mode picture, we recover the notion of subsystems, by referring to the partitioning of the orbital/mode that the fermions occupy, which allows us to naturally adopt the formalism of entanglement between distinguishable constituents. Both pictures reveal essential and interconnected aspects of fermionic entanglement, and thus offer precise tools for studying electron entanglement in highly relevant systems such as atoms and molecules. We showcase here two applications: i) resolving the correlation paradox in the molecular dissociation limit, ii) quantitative electronic structure analysis with orbital entanglement.
Bell's theorem shows that entangled quantum particles can exhibit correlations that classical particles cannot reproduce without an additional nonlocal resource, such as communication. In this sense, quantum particles are fundamentally more nonlocal than classical ones, and entanglement becomes unavoidable in physics. Here we prove the analogous result within quantum theory itself: indistinguishable fermions transmitted through a quantum network can generate correlations that distinguishable particles or indistinguishable bosons cannot reproduce without additional communication. In the same sense, fermions are fundamentally more nonlocal than bosons or distinguishable particles, motivating fermionic anticommutation and indistinguishability as unavoidable operational resources. Our result further implies that fermions can strictly surpass all qubit-based protocols for certain distributed computing tasks, demonstrating that a complete understanding of information processing requires going beyond qubits to fermionic information carriers - febits.