Unextendible product bases (UPBs) provide a versatile tool with various applications across different areas of quantum information theory. Their comprehensive characterization is thus of great importance and has been a subject of vital interest for over two decades now. An open question asks about the existence of UPBs, which are genuinely unextendible, i.e., they are not extendible even with biproduct vectors. In other words, the problem is to verify whether there exist genuinely entangled subspaces (GESs), subspaces composed solely of genuinely multiparty entangled states, complementary to UPBs. We solve this problem in the negative for many sizes of UPBs in different multipartite scenarios. In particular, in the all-important case of equal local dimensions, we show that there are always forbidden cardinalities for such UPBs, including the minimal ones corresponding to GESs of the maximal dimensions.
Unextendible product bases (UPBs) provide a versatile tool with various applications across different areas of quantum information theory. Their comprehensive characterization is thus of great importance and has been a subject of vital interest for over two decades now. An open question asks about the existence of UPBs, which are genuinely unextendible, i.e., they are not extendible even with biproduct vectors. In other words, the problem is to verify whether there exist genuinely entangled subspaces (GESs), subspaces composed solely of genuinely multiparty entangled states, complementary to UPBs. We solve this problem in the negative for many sizes of UPBs in different multipartite scenarios. In particular, in the all-important case of equal local dimensions, we show that there are always forbidden cardinalities for such UPBs, including the minimal ones corresponding to GESs of the maximal dimensions.
Unextendible product bases (UPBs) are interesting mathematical objects arising in composite Hilbert spaces that have found various applications in quantum information theory, for instance in a construction of bound entangled states or Bell inequalities without quantum violation. They are closely related to another important notion, completely entangled subspaces (CESs), which are those that do not contain any fully separable pure state. Among CESs one finds a class of subspaces in which all vectors are not only entangled but genuinely entangled. Here we explore the connection between UPBs and such genuinely entangled subspaces (GESs) and provide classes of nonorthogonal UPBs that lead to GESs for any number of parties and local dimensions. We then show how these subspaces can be immediately utilized for a simple general construction of genuinely entangled states in any such multipartite scenario.
While we possess a basic understanding of bipartite entangled systems, multipartite entanglement
remains mostly unexplored. Specifically, it is quite unclear how several concepts
developed for the bipartite case can be generalized in a meaningful way to study multipartite
scenarios. At the heart of this research on multiparty quantum states lies the problem
of testing the entanglement present in a given state. It has been proved, that in the most
general scenario, the question of determining the entanglement or separability of a state is
NP-hard.
From this perspective, it is desirable to have a construction of states for which
some prior knowledge about entanglement properties already exist. One particular approach
to this problem relies on the construction of Completely Entangled Subspaces
(CESes), i.e., subspaces void of product states. It follows that states in such subspaces
are necessarily entangled and form a convex set. This means we possess prior knowledge
of entanglement of all states in that subspace. In our study of multiparty systems, we have
constructed a specific subclass of the CESes such that all the states residing in the newly
constructed subspace is not only entangled but also Genuinely Entangled. A given state
is Genuinely Entangled if it is not just entangled for any pair among the multiparty but is
entangled with all the parties present and at the same time.
The notion of a CES is intimately connected with the idea of Unextendible Product
Bases (UPBs). UPBs are sets of twisted orthogonal product states/vectors spanning a
proper subset of a given Hilbert space. They have the property that no other product vector
exists in the ortho-complement of their span. While UPBs have been relatively well
studied for bipartite systems, no known multipartite orthogonal UPBs give rise to Genuinely
Entangled Subspace (GES). In our study, we provide schemes for the construction
of GES for a tripartite scenario. The construction proposed is linked to a Symmetric Block
structure such that it can be extended to any arbitrary dimension.One of the primary motivations for construction of UPBs is to create entangled
states which remain Positive under Partial Transposition (PPT). These classes of Entangled
States are known to be un-distillable and hence called Bound Entangled, i.e., states
in which the resource of Entanglement is not free to be used. These Bound Entangled states are essential to our understanding the basics of Entanglement Theory such as distillability,
quantification of entanglement, and the relationship between nonlocality and
entanglement (apart from their applications in other quantum information tasks). The
construction itself guarantees the PPTness of the state residing in the complementary subspace
i.e. formed by the equal mixture of the basis spanning the complementary space.
In our study, we propose a symmetric and an asymmetric construction of the Biseperable
and Genuinely Entangled states. Via the symmetric construction, we have derived two
subspaces, an eight-dimensional CES and a five-dimensional GES within the CES mentioned
above. The state formed by the equal mixtures of the CES is a Genuinely Bound
Entangled PPT state i.e., it entangled as well as PPT in each cut. To the best of author’s
knowledge, the proposed state is the only know Genuinely Entangled PPT state derived
from a UPB construction.
Additionally, the state lying in the ortho-complement of UPB (i.e., states formed
by an equal mixture of the basis of CES) is known to be a PPT Bound Entangled state.
However, unlike in case of UPBs, the state in the ortho-complement of Unextendible
Biseparable Product basis (i.e. states formed by an equal mixture of the basis of GES)
is found to be NPT states across all bipartitions. This is striking and prompts us to believe
that the state in the ortho-complement of CES is the only examples of bound entangled
state and distinct from other states in the space. We further expect that the state we obtain
must exhibit some distinctive features. We verify that this state is one copy undistillable.
However, the n-copy undistillablity needs to be probed further, and no conclusive
statement regarding the same can be made with our current analysis. The existence of
NPT-bound entangled state would prove that the distillable entanglement is nonadditive
and not convex.
The constructed subspace of Genuinely Entangled States in-turn reveals some
peculiar features. As mentioned above, unlike the Bennett et al., 1999 case, the state in the
ortho-complement is an NPT state across all bipartition. Furthermore, it was numerically
verified by taking one hundred thousand random probability distributions that the entire
five-dimensional genuine subspace obtained happens to be NPT. This leads us to conjecture
that the subspace obtained is a Genuinly Entangled NPT subspace. To the best of
the author’s knowledge, no known genuine NPT subspace exists for the multipartite scenario.
The exists only one other NPT subspace for Biseparable States and was suggested
by Johnston, 2013. Here, the construction is not related to UPBs. We further argue that
if our conjecture on the NPTness of the entire subspace is correct, any four-dimensional
subspace of the constructed tripartite NPT GES is also distillable. This would then be the
only known distillable subspace in a multipartite scenario. We believe that our study brings us closer to a systematic analysis of multipartite
entanglement and provides us with tools to probe further into the current mess of an
entangled (read communicating) world of multiple actors.
Unextendible product bases (UPBs) play a key role in the study of quantum entanglement and nonlocality. A famous open question is whether there exist genuinely unextendible product bases (GUPBs), namely multipartite product bases that are unextendible with respect to every possible bipartition. Here we shed light on this question by providing a characterization of UPBs and GUPBs in terms of orthogonality graphs. Building on this connection, we develop a method for constructing UPBs in low dimensions, and we derive a lower bound on the size of any GUPB, significantly improving over the state of the art. Moreover, we show that every minimal GUPB saturating our bound must be associated to regular graphs. Finally, we discuss a possible path towards the construction of a minimal GUPB in a tripartite system of minimal local dimension.
Unextendible product bases (UPBs) play a key role in the study of quantum entanglement and nonlocality. Here we provide an equivalent characterization of UPBs in graph-theoretic terms. Different from previous graph-theoretic investigations of UPBs, which focused mostly on the orthogonality relations between different product states, our characterization includes a graph-theoretic reformulation of the unextendibility condition. Building on this characterization, we develop a constructive method for building UPBs in low dimensions and shed light on the open question of whether there exist genuinely unextendible product bases (GUPBs), that is, multipartite product bases that are unextendible with respect to every possible bipartition. We derive a lower bound on the size of any candidate GUPB, significantly improving over the state of the art. Moreover, we show that every minimal GUPB saturating our bound must be associated to regular graphs and discuss a possible path towards the construction of a minimal GUPB in a tripartite system of minimal local dimension. Finally, we apply our characterization to the problem of distinguishing UPB states under local operations and classical communication, deriving a necessary condition for reliable discrimination in the asymptotic limit.
Abstract Genuinely entangled subspaces (GESs) are the class of completely entangled subspaces that contain only genuinely multiparty entangled states. They constitute a particularly useful notion in the theory of entanglement but also have found an application, for instance, in quantum error correction and cryptography. In a recent study (Demianowicz and Augusiak in Phys Rev A 98:012313, 2018), we have shown how GESs can be efficiently constructed in any multiparty scenario from the so-called unextendible product bases. The provided subspaces, however, are not of maximal allowable dimensions, and our aim here is to put forward an approach to building such. The method is illustrated with few examples in small systems. Connections with other mathematical problems, such as spaces of matrices of equal rank and the numerical range, are discussed.
In quantum information theory, the state space of a multipartite quantum system is modeled by a tensor product. In the tensor-product space $\C^{d_1}\otimes\cdots\otimes\C^{d_p}$, a nonzero vector is a \emph{product state} if it can be written as ∣φ1⟩⊗⋯⊗∣φp⟩ with $\ket{\varphi_j}\in\C^{d_j}\setminus\{0\}$. An \emph{unextendible product basis} (UPB) is a finite family of pairwise orthogonal product states such that no nonzero product state is orthogonal to all of them. UPBs play a key role in investigating quantum entanglement and nonlocal phenomena. Finding a smallest UPB is a natural extremal problem: it asks how few pairwise orthogonal product states suffice to prevent any further product state from being added. The general minimum-size problem for UPBs has been studied for over two decades since the seminal work of Alon and Lovász.
Let fm(d1,…,dp) be the minimum cardinality of a UPB in the space, and let fLB(d1,…,dp)=1+∑j=1p(dj−1) be the natural lower bound. Alon and Lovász determined exactly when fm attains the lower bound fLB, but the obstructed multipartite cases remained open in general.
We prove a stabilization theorem: for every non-all-qubit system with p≥3, whenever the natural lower bound fLB is unattainable, the true minimum is exactly fLB+1. Precisely, if the number of even local dimensions di is positive and even, and at least one local dimension is greater than two, then fm(d1,…,dp)=fLB(d1,…,dp)+1. The proof is built on a unified graph-theoretic framework. Our result, together with earlier work, settles the minimum size problem for UPBs in all finite quantum systems.