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Physical Review Letters

Asymptotic Manipulations of Entanglement Can Exhibit Genuine Irreversibility

Michał Horodecki, Paweł Horodecki, Ryszard Horodecki

Published May 8, 2000• 40 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is commonly believed that distillation of entanglement can be, in general, irreversible. Perhaps the strongest evidence is constituted by the existence of the bound entangled states. However, even a single example of state exhibiting this irreversibility has not been found so far. We show that for a family of states the process of distillation of entanglement is truly irreversible. These states have a nonzero amount of bound entanglement and, at most, a very small amount of free entanglement.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.84.4260

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It is commonly believed that distillation of entanglement can be, in general, irreversible. Perhaps the strongest evidence is constituted by the existence of the bound entangled states. However, even a single example of state exhibiting this irreversibility has not been found so far. We show that for a family of states the process of distillation of entanglement is truly irreversible. These states have a nonzero amount of bound entanglement and, at most, a very small amount of free entanglement.
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.
There exist bipartite quantum states that cost entanglement to create, yet from which no singlet can be distilled. This extreme irreversibility is known as bound entanglement. A quarter-century ago, Gisin and Wolf asked whether classical information theory admits the same phenomenon. Are there correlations, shared by two parties and an eavesdropper, that cost secret bits to create, yet from which none can be distilled? This question is part of a broader program exploring the relation between quantum and classical information theory. We answer it in the affirmative, providing a simple example, a distribution of two bits and a trit. Bound entanglement thus has a classical counterpart, bound information. An even more direct correspondence was originally conjectured, namely that measuring purifications of bound-entangled states yields distributions with bound information. The very states that motivated the conjecture, however, yield no bound information when measured in the standard basis, whereas suitable measurements of purifications of separable states do. The analogy between bound entanglement and bound information thus lies in the accounting of resources, not in a correspondence between individual quantum states and the classical probability distributions induced by measuring them.