Entanglement is one of the pillars of quantum mechanics and quantum information processing, and as a result the quantumness of nonentangled states has typically been overlooked and unrecognized. We give a robust definition for the classicality versus quantumness of a single multipartite quantum state, a set of states, and a protocol using quantum states. We show a variety of nonentangled (separable) states that exhibit interesting quantum properties, and we explore the ``zoo'' of separable states; several interesting subclasses are defined based on their diagonalizing bases, and their non-classical behavior is investigated.
We study the advantages of quantum communication models over classical communication models that are equipped with a limited number of qubits of entanglement. In this direction, we give explicit partial functions on
n bits for which reducing the entanglement increases the classical communication complexity exponentially. Our separations are as follows. For every
k≥1:
Q∥∗ versus
R2∗: We show that quantum simultaneous protocols with
Θ~(k5log3n) qubits of entanglement can exponentially outperform two-way randomized protocols with
O(k) qubits of entanglement. This resolves an open problem from [Gav08] and improves the state-of-the-art separations between quantum simultaneous protocols with entanglement and two-way randomized protocols without entanglement [Gav19, GRT22].
R∥∗ versus
Q∥∗: We show that classical simultaneous protocols with
Θ~(klogn) qubits of entanglement can exponentially outperform quantum simultaneous protocols with
O(k) qubits of entanglement, resolving an open question from [GKRW06, Gav19]. The best result prior to our work was a relational separation against protocols without entanglement [GKRW06].
R∥∗ versus
R1∗: We show that classical simultaneous protocols with
Θ~(klogn) qubits of entanglement can exponentially outperform randomized one-way protocols with
O(k) qubits of entanglement. Prior to our work, only a relational separation was known [Gav08]. Our techniques can also be used to show advantages of quantum communication models over hybrid classical-quantum models, i.e., models that have a large amount of both classical communication and quantum simultaneous communication.
Entanglement is one of the pillars of quantum mechanics and quantum information processing, and as a result, the quantumness of nonentangled states has typically been overlooked and unrecognized until the last decade. We give a robust definition for the classicality versus quantumness of a single multipartite quantum state, a set of states, and a protocol using quantum states. We show a variety of nonentangled (separable) states that exhibit interesting quantum properties, and we explore the “zoo” of separable states; several interesting subclasses are defined based on the diagonalizing bases of the states, and their nonclassical behavior is investigated.