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IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

Asymptotic reversibility of LOCC conversions

Kosuke Ito, Wataru Kumagai, Masahito Hayashi

Published Jun 1, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Recently, two of the authors showed that entanglement concentration is irreversible. However, it is still not clear what kind of LOCC conversion is reversible. We derive the necessary and sufficient condition for reversibility of LOCC conversion between two bipartite pure entangled states in an asymptotic setting. Simultaneously, we evaluate how many copies of the initial state is to be lost to overcome irreversibility of LOCC conversion. Our result is useful for designing how to store entangled states via LOCC operations without error.

DOI
10.1109/isit.2014.6874889

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Recently, two of the authors showed that entanglement concentration is irreversible. However, it is still not clear what kind of LOCC conversion is reversible. We derive the necessary and sufficient condition for reversibility of LOCC conversion between two bipartite pure entangled states in an asymptotic setting. Simultaneously, we evaluate how many copies of the initial state is to be lost to overcome irreversibility of LOCC conversion. Our result is useful for designing how to store entangled states via LOCC operations without error.
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 consider asymptotic convertibility of an arbitrary sequence of bipartite pure states into another by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We adopt an information-spectrum approach to address cases where each element of the sequences is not necessarily a tensor power of a bipartite pure state. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the LOCC convertibility of one sequence to another in terms of spectral entropy rates of entanglement of the sequences. Based on these results, we also provide simple proofs for previously known results on the optimal rates of entanglement concentration and dilution of general sequences of bipartite pure states.
The manipulation of quantum entanglement is fundamentally irreversible: some mixed entangled states require pure entanglement for their preparation, although no pure entanglement can be recovered from them by local operations and classical communication. This irreversibility is known to persist even under the maximal class of operations that do not generate entanglement, revealing a fundamental distinction between entanglement theory and thermodynamics. We construct cases for which any attempt to restore reversibility necessarily incurs an error that increases exponentially with the number of copies. Technically, we demonstrate a strict separation between the exponential strong-converse distillable entanglement and the exponential strong-converse entanglement cost. Our result resolves a conjecture posed by Lami and Regula (Nat. Phys. 19, 184-189 (2023)) and strengthens it by showing that the irreversibility of entanglement persists even at the level of polynomially (in the number of copies) growing error. We further derive a semidefinite-programming lower bound on the exponential strong-converse cost under non-entangling operations. Finally, for the class of completely PPT-preserving operations, we construct analytically solvable families of antisymmetric states exhibiting the exponential strong-converse irreversibility. Remarkably, to our knowledge, no analogous separation between exponential strong converse cost and the analogous distillable entanglement is currently known even under the more restrictive class of LOCC operations.
We study the exact, non-deterministic conversion of multipartite pure quantum states into one-another via local operations and classical communication (LOCC) and asymptotic entanglement transformation under such channels. In particular, we consider the maximal number of copies of any given target state that can be extracted exactly from many copies of any given initial state as a function of the exponential decay in the success probability, known as the converse error exponent. We give a formula for the optimal rate presented as an infimum over the asymptotic spectrum of LOCC conversion. A full understanding of exact asymptotic extraction rates between pure states in the converse regime thus depends on a full understanding of this spectrum. We present a characterization of spectral points and use it to describe the spectrum in the bipartite case. This leads to a full description of the spectrum and thus an explicit formula for the asymptotic extraction rate between pure bipartite states, given a converse error exponent. This extends the result on entanglement concentration in [1], where the target state is fixed as the Bell state. In the limit of vanishing converse error exponent, the rate formula provides an upper bound on the exact asymptotic extraction rate between two states, when the probability of success goes to 1. In the bipartite case, we prove that this bound holds with equality.
In quantum information theory, it is widely believed that entanglement concentration for bipartite pure states is asymptotically reversible. In order to examine this, we give a precise formulation of the problem, and show a trade-off relation between performance and reversibility, which implies the irreversibility of entanglement concentration. Then, we regard entanglement concentration as entangled state compression in an entanglement storage with lower dimension. Because of the irreversibility of entanglement concentration, an initial state cannot be completely recovered after the compression process and a loss inevitably arises in the process. We numerically calculate this loss and also derive for it a highly accurate analytical approximation.
We prove continuity of distillable entanglement, the optimal asymptotic rate at which copies of a bipartite state can be converted into maximally entangled pairs by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) with vanishing error. We establish an explicit asymptotic continuity bound that holds for arbitrary bipartite states and depends logarithmically on the system dimension. This bound has the same structure as known continuity bounds for conditional entropy, entanglement cost, and relative entropy of entanglement. Our proof constructs an explicit LOCC protocol that converts either of two arbitrary bipartite states into the other at an ebit cost that vanishes as their trace distance tends to zero.