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arXiv:2605.29197

Fundamental limitations on entanglement extraction from purity

Tulja Varun Kondra, Pedro Barrios Hita, Justus Neumann, Hermann Kampermann, Dagmar Bruß

quant-phSubmitted May 28, 2026• Announced May 29, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

States of sufficiently low purity are separable and cannot be entangled by unital (purity-non-generating) operations. Since high-purity states are experimentally demanding, it is natural to ask how much purity a state must possess to enable entanglement generation. Absolutely separable states remain separable under all deterministic unital channels, and so cannot deterministically generate entanglement in this setting. We show, however, that some absolutely separable states can generate entanglement via probabilistic protocols that do not produce purity. This motivates the study of states that fail to generate entanglement with any non-zero probability, which we call completely absolutely separable; we give a full characterization of this class. Along the way, we derive a novel sufficient condition for separability that depends only on the largest and smallest eigenvalues, along with the smallest local dimension and is independent of all previously known spectral separability criteria.

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6+9 pages, 1 figure

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States of sufficiently low purity are separable and cannot be entangled by unital (purity-non-generating) operations. Since high-purity states are experimentally demanding, it is natural to ask how much purity a state must possess to enable entanglement generation. Absolutely separable states remain separable under all deterministic unital channels, and so cannot deterministically generate entanglement in this setting. We show, however, that some absolutely separable states can generate entanglement via probabilistic protocols that do not produce purity. This motivates the study of states that fail to generate entanglement with any non-zero probability, which we call completely absolutely separable; we give a full characterization of this class. Along the way, we derive a novel sufficient condition for separability that depends only on the largest and smallest eigenvalues, along with the smallest local dimension and is independent of all previously known spectral separability criteria.
Separability from the spectrum is a significant and ongoing research topic in quantum entanglement. In this study, we investigate properties related to absolute separability from the spectrum in qudits-qudits states in the bipartite states space Hmn=Hm⊗Hn\mathcal{H}_{mn}=\mathcal{H}_m \otimes \mathcal{H}_nHmn​=Hm​⊗Hn​. Firstly, we propose the necessary and sufficient conditions for absolute separable states in the Hilbert space H4n\mathcal{H}_{4n}H4n​. These conditions are equivalent to the positive semidefiniteness of twelve matrices resulting from the symmetric matricizations of eigenvalues. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this sufficient condition can be extended to the general Hmn\mathcal{H}_{mn}Hmn​ case, improving existing conclusions in the literature. These sufficient conditions depend only on the first few leading and last few leading eigenvalues, significantly reducing the complexity of determining absolute separable states. On the other hand, we also introduce additional sufficient conditions for determining that states in Hmn\mathcal{H}_{mn}Hmn​ are not absolutely separable. These conditions only depend on 2m−12m-12m−1 eigenvalues of the mixed states. Our sufficient conditions are not only simple and easy to implement. As applications, we derive distance bounds for eigenvalues and purity bounds for general absolutely separable states.
The controlled generation of quantum entanglement from separable states remains a central challenge in quantum information science. Here, we investigate entanglement generation using two related control paradigms: coherent path superposition of local unitary operations and stochastic implementations of Pauli channels under coherent control. We show that entangled states belonging to the Bell, GHZ and W classes, can be deterministically generated from fully separable inputs by coherently superposing alternative sets of local unitary transformations. Conditions on the local operators for entanglement generation are derived, and the resulting states are shown to be locally unitary equivalent to standard multipartite entangled states. We further extend the analysis to noisy scenarios, where separable mixed states evolve through pairs of Pauli channels arranged in path-superposition and indefinite causal order configurations. Closed-form expressions for the output states are obtained, and entanglement is quantified using concurrence. By exploring representative channel families across their parameter space, we identify regimes where stochastic entanglement emerges, determine the associated success probabilities, and characterize trade-offs between entanglement and purity.
Absolutely separable states ϱ remain separable under arbitrary unitary transformations . By example of a three qubit system we show that in a multipartite scenario neither full separability implies bipartite absolute separability nor the reverse statement holds. The main goal of the paper is to analyze quantum maps resulting in absolutely separable output states. Such absolutely separating maps affect the states in a way, when no Hamiltonian dynamics can make them entangled afterwards. We study the general properties of absolutely separating maps and channels with respect to bipartitions and multipartitions and show that absolutely separating maps are not necessarily entanglement breaking. We examine the stability of absolutely separating maps under a tensor product and show that is absolutely separating for any N if and only if Φ is the tracing map. Particular results are obtained for families of local unital multiqubit channels, global generalized Pauli channels, and combination of identity, transposition, and tracing maps acting on states of arbitrary dimension. We also study the interplay between local and global noise components in absolutely separating bipartite depolarizing maps and discuss the input states with high resistance to absolute separability.
The absolute separability problem asks for a characterization of the quantum states ρ∈Mm⊗Mn\rho \in M_m\otimes M_nρ∈Mm​⊗Mn​ with the property that UρU†U\rho U^\daggerUρU† is separable for all unitary matrices UUU. We investigate whether or not it is the case that ρ\rhoρ is absolutely separable if and only if UρU†U\rho U^\daggerUρU† has positive partial transpose for all unitary matrices UUU. In particular, we develop an easy-to-use method for showing that an entanglement witness or positive map is unable to detect entanglement in any such state, and we apply our method to many well-known separability criteria, including the range criterion, the realignment criterion, the Choi map and its generalizations, and the Breuer--Hall map. We also show that these two properties coincide for the family of isotropic states, and several eigenvalue results for entanglement witnesses are proved along the way that are of independent interest.
The absolute separability problem asks for a characterization of the quantum states ρ∈Mm⊗Mnρ\in M_m\otimes M_nρ∈Mm​⊗Mn​ with the property that UρU†UρU^\daggerUρU† is separable for all unitary matrices UUU. We investigate whether or not it is the case that ρρρ is absolutely separable if and only if UρU†UρU^\daggerUρU† has positive partial transpose for all unitary matrices UUU. In particular, we develop an easy-to-use method for showing that an entanglement witness or positive map is unable to detect entanglement in any such state, and we apply our method to many well-known separability criteria, including the range criterion, the realignment criterion, the Choi map and its generalizations, and the Breuer-Hall map. We also show that these two properties coincide for the family of isotropic states, and several eigenvalue results for entanglement witnesses are proved along the way that are of independent interest.
We characterize the boundary of the convex compact set of absolutely separable states, referred as AS, that cannot be transformed to entangled states by global unitary operators, in $2\ensuremath{\bigotimes}d$ Hilbert space. However, we show that the absolutely separable states of rank $(2d\ensuremath{-}1)$ are extreme points of such sets. We then discuss conditions to examine if a given full-rank absolutely separable state is an interior point or a boundary point of AS. Moreover, we construct two-qubit absolutely separable states which are boundary points but not extreme points of AS and prove the existence of full-rank extreme points of AS. Properties of certain interior points are also explored. We further show that by examining the boundary of the above set, it is possible to develop an algorithm to generate the absolutely separable states which stay outside the maximal ball. By considering paradigmatic noise models, we find the amount of local noise which the input entangled states can sustain, so that the output states do not become absolutely separable. Interestingly, we report that with the decrease of entanglement of the pure input state, critical depolarizing noise value, transferring an entangled state to an absolutely separable one, increases, thereby showing advantages of sharing nonmaximally entangled states. Furthermore, when the input two-qubit states are Haar uniformly generated, we report a hierarchy among quantum channels according to the generation of absolutely separable states.