Suppose Alice and Bob can transform one shared mixed state into another by local operations and classical communication, and can also recover the first state from the second. What can change in such a conversion? We give a complete classification of reversible conversions between two-qutrit states. We consider exact deterministic LOCC transformations of a single copy, allowing finite protocols and the countable protocols specified here. Local flags are known to allow a separable part to be replaced by local preparation while an entangled block is retained. We prove that such a decomposition is necessary for two mutually convertible entangled states that are not locally unitarily equivalent. The two parts are distinguishable by local measurements. The entangled blocks have the same weight and are locally unitarily equivalent after normalization. Each entangled state has a unique smallest retained block. Two entangled states are reversibly convertible if and only if these unnormalized blocks are locally unitarily equivalent. For a state with negative partial transpose, the smallest block can be found using the negative eigenspace of its partial transpose and at most three matrix zero tests.
Suppose Alice and Bob can transform one shared mixed state into another by local operations and classical communication, and can also recover the first state from the second. What can change in such a conversion? We give a complete classification of reversible conversions between two-qutrit states. We consider exact deterministic LOCC transformations of a single copy, allowing finite protocols and the countable protocols specified here. Local flags are known to allow a separable part to be replaced by local preparation while an entangled block is retained. We prove that such a decomposition is necessary for two mutually convertible entangled states that are not locally unitarily equivalent. The two parts are distinguishable by local measurements. The entangled blocks have the same weight and are locally unitarily equivalent after normalization. Each entangled state has a unique smallest retained block. Two entangled states are reversibly convertible if and only if these unnormalized blocks are locally unitarily equivalent. For a state with negative partial transpose, the smallest block can be found using the negative eigenspace of its partial transpose and at most three matrix zero tests.
Suppose that two distant parties Alice and Bob share an entangled state ρAB, and they want to exchange the subsystems of ρAB by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). In general, this LOCC task (i.e. the LOCC transformation of ρAB→VρABV with V being a swap operator) is impossible deterministically, but becomes possible probabilistically. In this paper, we study how the optimal probability is related to the amount of entanglement in the framework of positive partial transposed (PPT) operations, and numerically show a remarkable class of states whose probability is the smallest among every state in two quantum bits.
Recently, entanglement concentration was explicitly shown to be irreversible. However, it is still not clear what kind of states can be reversibly converted in the asymptotic setting by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) when neither the initial nor the target state is maximally entangled. We derive the necessary and sufficient condition for the reversibility of LOCC conversions between two bipartite pure entangled states in the asymptotic setting. In addition, we show that conversion can be achieved perfectly with only local unitary operation under such condition except for special cases. Interestingly, our result implies that an error-free reversible conversion is asymptotically possible even between states whose copies can never be locally unitarily equivalent with any finite numbers of copies, although such a conversion is impossible in the finite setting. In fact, we show such an example. Moreover, we establish how to overcome the irreversibility of LOCC conversion in two ways. As for the first method, we evaluate how many copies of the initial state are to be lost to overcome the irreversibility of LOCC conversion. The second method is to add a supplementary state appropriately, which also works for local unitary conversion unlike the first method. Especially, for the qubit system, any nonmaximally pure entangled state can be a universal resource for the asymptotic reversibility when copies of the state are sufficiently many. More interestingly, our analysis implies that far-from-maximally entangled states can be better than nearly maximally entangled states as this type of resource. This fact brings new insight to the resource theory of state conversion.
We study the problem of transforming a set of pure bipartite states into another using deterministic LOCC (local operations and classical communication). Necessary conditions for the existence of such a transformation are obtained using LOCC constraints on state transformation, entanglement, and distinguishability. These conditions are shown to be independent but not sufficient. We discuss their satisfiability and classify all possible input-output pairs of sets accordingly. We also prove that strict inclusions hold between LOCC, separable, and positive partial transpose operations for set transformation problems.
The study of state transformations by spatially separated parties with local operations assisted by classical communication (LOCC) plays a crucial role in entanglement theory and its applications in quantum information processing. Transformations of this type among pure bipartite states were characterized long ago and have a revealing theoretical structure. However, it turns out that generic fully entangled pure multipartite states cannot be obtained from nor transformed to any inequivalent fully entangled state under LOCC. States with this property are referred to as isolated. Nevertheless, multipartite states are classified into families, the so-called SLOCC classes, which possess very different properties. Thus, the above result does not forbid the existence of particular SLOCC classes that are free of isolation, and therefore, display a rich structure regarding LOCC convertibility. In fact, it is known that the celebrated n -qubit GHZ and W states give particular examples of such classes and in this work, we investigate this question in general. One of our main results is to show that the SLOCC class of the 3-qutrit totally antisymmetric state is isolation-free as well. Actually, all states in this class can be converted to inequivalent states by LOCC protocols with just one round of classical communication (as in the GHZ and W cases). Thus, we consider next whether there are other classes with this property and we find a large set of negative answers. Indeed, we prove weak isolation (i.e., states that cannot be obtained with finite-round LOCC nor transformed by one-round LOCC) for very general classes, including all SLOCC families with compact stabilizers and many with non-compact stabilizers, such as the classes corresponding to the n -qunit totally antisymmetric states for n≥4 . Finally, given the pleasant feature found in the family corresponding to the 3-qutrit totally antisymmetric state, we explore in more detail the structure induced by LOCC and the entanglement properties within this class.
Understanding multipartite entanglement is vital, as it underpins a wide range of phenomena across physics. The study of transformations of states via Local Operations assisted by Classical Communication (LOCC) allows one to quantitatively analyse entanglement, as it induces a partial order in the Hilbert space. However, it has been shown that, for systems with fixed local dimensions, this order is generically trivial, which prevents relating multipartite states to each other with respect to any entanglement measure. In order to obtain a non-trivial partial ordering, we study a physically motivated extension of LOCC: multi-state LOCC. Here, one considers simultaneous LOCC transformations acting on a finite number of entangled pure states. We study both multipartite and bipartite multi-state transformations. In the multipartite case, we demonstrate that one can change the stochastic LOCC (SLOCC) class of the individual initial states by only applying Local Unitaries (LUs). We show that, by transferring entanglement from one state to the other, one can perform state conversions not possible in the single copy case; provide examples of multipartite entanglement catalysis; and demonstrate improved probabilistic protocols. In the bipartite case, we identify numerous non-trivial LU transformations and show that the source entanglement is not additive. These results demonstrate that multi-state LOCC has a much richer landscape than single-state LOCC.