This brief review discusses the problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable or entangled. I describe an established approach to this problem that is based on the monogamy of entanglement, which is the observation that a pair of quantum systems that are strongly entangled must be uncorrelated with the rest of the world. Unentangled states on the other hand involve correlations that can be shared with many other parties. Checking whether a given quantum state is shareable involves constructing certain symmetric quantum state extensions and I discuss how to do this using a class of optimizations known as semidefinite programs. An attractive feature of this approach is that it generates explicit entanglement witnesses that can be measured to demonstrate the entanglement experimentally. In recent years analysis of this approach has greatly increased our understanding of the complexity of determining whether a given quantum state is entangled and this review aims to give a unified discussion of these developments. Specifically, I describe how to use finite quantum de Finetti theorems to prove that highly shareable states are nearly separable and use these results to understand the computational complexity of the problem. This article is part of a special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical devoted to '50 years of Bell's theorem'.
This brief review discusses the problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable or entangled. I describe an established approach to this problem that is based on the monogamy of entanglement, which is the observation that a pair of quantum systems that are strongly entangled must be uncorrelated with the rest of the world. Unentangled states on the other hand involve correlations that can be shared with many other parties. Checking whether a given quantum state is shareable involves constructing certain symmetric quantum state extensions and I discuss how to do this using a class of optimizations known as semidefinite programs. An attractive feature of this approach is that it generates explicit entanglement witnesses that can be measured to demonstrate the entanglement experimentally. In recent years analysis of this approach has greatly increased our understanding of the complexity of determining whether a given quantum state is entangled and this review aims to give a unified discussion of these developments. Specifically, I describe how to use finite quantum de Finetti theorems to prove that highly shareable states are nearly separable and use these results to understand the computational complexity of the problem. This article is part of a special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical devoted to '50 years of Bell's theorem'.
A fruitful way of studying physical theories is via the question whether the possible physical states and different kinds of correlations in each theory can be shared to different parties. Over the past few years it has become clear that both quantum entanglement and non-locality (i.e., correlations that violate Bell-type inequalities) have limited shareability properties and can sometimes even be monogamous. We give a self-contained review of these results and present new results on the shareability of different kinds of correlations, including local, quantum and no-signalling correlations. This includes an alternative simpler proof of the Toner-Verstraete monogamy inequality for quantum correlations, as well as a strengthening thereof. Further, the relationship between sharing non-local quantum correlations and sharing mixed entangled states is investigated, and already for the simplest case of bi-partite correlations and qubits this is shown to be non-trivial. Also, a recently proposed new interpretation of Bell’s theorem by Schumacher in terms of shareability of correlations is critically assessed. Finally, the relevance of monogamy of non-local correlations for secure quantum key distribution is pointed out, and in this regard it is stressed that not all non-local correlations are monogamous.
Ever since entanglement was identified as a computational and cryptographic resource, researchers have sought efficient ways to tell whether a given density matrix represents an unentangled, or separable, state. This paper gives the first systematic and comprehensive treatment of this (bipartite) quantum separability problem, focusing on its deterministic (as opposed to randomized) computational complexity. First, I review the one-sided tests for separability, paying particular attention to the semidefinite programming methods. Then, I discuss various ways of formulating the quantum separability problem, from exact to approximate formulations, the latter of which are the paper's main focus. I then give a thorough treatment of the problem's relationship with the complexity classes NP, NP-complete, and co-NP. I also discuss extensions of Gurvits' NP-hardness result to strong NP-hardness of certain related problems. A major open question is whether the NP-contained formulation (QSEP) of the quantum separability problem is Karp-NP-complete; QSEP may be the first natural example of a problem that is Turing-NP-complete but not Karp-NP-complete. Finally, I survey all the proposed (deterministic) algorithms for the quantum separability problem, including the bounded search for symmetric extensions (via semidefinite programming), based on the recent quantum de Finetti theorem; and the entanglement-witness search (via interior-point algorithms and global optimization). These two algorithms have the lowest complexity, with the latter being the best under advice of asymptotically optimal point-coverings of the sphere.
Ever since entanglement was identified as a computational and cryptographic resource, researchers have sought efficient ways to tell whether a given density matrix represents an unentangled, or separable, state. This paper gives the first systematic and comprehensive treatment of this (bipartite) quantum separability problem, focusing on its deterministic (as opposed to randomized) computational complexity. First, I review the one-sided tests for separability, paying particular attention to the semidefinite programming methods. Then, I discuss various ways of formulating the quantum separability problem, from exact to approximate formulations, the latter of which are the paper’s main focus. I then give a thorough treatment of the problem’s relationship with NP, NP-completeness, and co-NP. I also discuss extensions of Gurvits ’ NP-hardness result to strong NP-hardness of certain related problems. A major open question is whether the NP-contained formulation (QSEP) of the quantum separability problem is Karp-NP-complete; QSEP may be the first natural example of a problem that is Turing-NP-complete but not Karp-NP-complete. Finally, I survey all the proposed (deterministic) algorithms for the quantum separability problem, including the bounded search for symmetric extensions (via semidefinite programming), based on the recent quantum de Finetti theorem [1, 2, 3]; and the entanglement-witness search (via interior-point algorithms and global optimization) [4, 5]. These two algorithms have the lowest complexity, with the latter being the best under advice of asymptotically optimal point-coverings of the sphere.
Ever since entanglement was identified as a computational and cryptographic resource, researchers have sought efficient ways to tell whether a given density matrix represents an unentangled, or \emph{separable}, state. This paper gives the first systematic and comprehensive treatment of this (bipartite) quantum separability problem, focusing on its deterministic (as opposed to randomized) computational complexity. First, I review the one-sided tests for separability, paying particular attention to the semidefinite programming methods. Then, I discuss various ways of formulating the quantum separability problem, from exact to approximate formulations, the latter of which are the paper's main focus. I then give a thorough treatment of the problem's relationship with NP, NP-completeness, and co-NP. I also discuss extensions of Gurvits' NP-hardness result to strong NP-hardness of certain related problems. A major open question is whether the NP-contained formulation (QSEP) of the quantum separability problem is Karp-NP-complete; QSEP may be the first natural example of a problem that is Turing-NP-complete but not Karp-NP-complete. Finally, I survey all the proposed (deterministic) algorithms for the quantum separability problem, including the bounded search for symmetric extensions (via semidefinite programming), based on the recent quantum de Finetti theorem \cite{DPS02,DPS04,qphCKMR06}; and the entanglement-witness search (via interior-point algorithms and global optimization) \cite{ITCE04,IT06}. These two algorithms have the lowest complexity, with the latter being the best under advice of asymptotically optimal point-coverings of the sphere.
Ever since entanglement was identified as a computational and cryptographic resource, effort has been made to find an efficient way to tell whether a given density matrix represents an unentangled, or separable, state. Essentially, this is the quantum separability problem. In Section 1, I begin with a brief introduction to separability and entanglement, and a basic formal definition of the quantum separability problem. I conclude with a summary of one-sided tests for separability, including those involving semidefinite programming. In Section 2, I treat the separability problem as a computational decision problem and motivate its approximate formulations. After a review of basic complexity-theoretic notions, I discuss the computational complexity of the separability problem. In Section 3, I give a comprehensive survey of deterministic algorithmic solutions to the (approximate) quantum separability problem. Finally, Section 4 contains a comparison of the complexities of the algorithms surveyed in Section 3. I have attempted to give a comprehensive treatment of the deterministic quantum separability problem from a computational perspective and identify relevant open problems. Features and new results include:
We discuss the problem of determining whether the state of several quantum mechanical subsystems is entangled. As in previous work on two subsystems we introduce a procedure for checking separability that is based on finding state extensions with appropriate properties and may be implemented as a semidefinite program. The main result of this work is to show that there is a series of tests of this kind such that if a multiparty state is entangled this will eventually be detected by one of the tests. The procedure also provides a means of constructing entanglement witnesses that could in principle be measured in order to demonstrate that the state is entangled.