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Physical Review Letters

Increasing Entanglement Monotones by Separable Operations

Eric Chitambar, Wei Cui, Hoi‐Kwong Lo

Published Jun 15, 2012• 52 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum entanglement is fundamentally related to the operational setting of local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC). A more general class of operations known as separable operations (SEP) is often employed to approximate LOCC, but the exact difference between LOCC and SEP is unknown. In this letter, we compare the two classes in performing particular tripartite to bipartite entanglement conversions and report a gap as large as 12.5% between SEP and LOCC, which is the first known appreciable gap between the classes. Our results rely on constructing a computable entanglement monotone with a clear operational meaning that, unlike all other such monotones previously studied, is not monotonic under SEP. Finally, we prove the curious fact that convergent sequences of LOCC protocols need not be LOCC feasible in the limit.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.108.240504

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Quantum entanglement is fundamentally related to the operational setting of local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC). A more general class of operations known as separable operations (SEP) is often employed to approximate LOCC, but the exact difference between LOCC and SEP is unknown. In this letter, we compare the two classes in performing particular tripartite to bipartite entanglement conversions and report a gap as large as 12.5% between SEP and LOCC, which is the first known appreciable gap between the classes. Our results rely on constructing a computable entanglement monotone with a clear operational meaning that, unlike all other such monotones previously studied, is not monotonic under SEP. Finally, we prove the curious fact that convergent sequences of LOCC protocols need not be LOCC feasible in the limit.
In this article, we extend recent results concerning random-pair Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen distillation and the operational gap between separable operations (SEPs) and local operations with classical communication (LOCC). In particular, we consider the problem of obtaining bipartite maximal entanglement from an NNN-qubit WWW-class state (i.e., that of the form $\sqrt{{x}_{0}}|00\ensuremath{\cdots}0\ensuremath{\rangle}+\sqrt{{x}_{1}}|10\ensuremath{\cdots}0\ensuremath{\rangle}+\ensuremath{\cdots}+\sqrt{{x}_{n}}|00\ensuremath{\cdots}1\ensuremath{\rangle}$) when the target pairs are a priori unspecified. We show that when x0=0{x}_{0}=0x0​=0, the optimal probabilities for SEPs can be computed using semidefinite programming. On the other hand, to bound the optimal probabilities achievable by LOCC, we introduce entanglement monotones defined on the NNN-qubit WWW class of states. The LOCC monotones we construct can be increased by SEPs, and in terms of transformation success probability, we are able to quantify a gap as large as 37% between the two classes. Additionally, we demonstrate transformations ${\ensuremath{\rho}}^{\ensuremath{\bigotimes}n}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{\ensuremath{\bigotimes}n}$ that are feasible by SEP for any nnn but impossible by LOCC.
Entanglement plays an important role in quantum computation and information. We can only manipulate an entangled quantum state shared among several distant parties by local operations with classical communication (LOCC). Thus, it is of great importance to characterize the conditions by which we can determine whether one pure quantum state can be transformed to another pure state by LOCC. It is well known that separable operations and LOCC are not equivalent. Dozens of results have illustrated this difference. Little do we know about this difference despite these recent results. It is shown in this paper that if the initial state $|\ensuremath{\psi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and final state $|\ensuremath{\phi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ are genuine tripartite pure states in the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) class then $|\ensuremath{\psi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ can be transformed to $|\ensuremath{\phi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ by separable operations if and only if $|\ensuremath{\psi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ can be transformed to $|\ensuremath{\phi}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ by deterministic LOCC. That is, SEP equals LOCC on tripartite GHZ states.
The weird phenomenon of "quantum nonlocality without entanglement" means that local quantum operations assisted by classical communication constitute a proper subset of the class of separable quantum operations. Despite considerable recent advances, little is known to what extent the class of separable operations differs from local quantum operations and classical communication. In this Letter we show that separable operations are generally stronger than local quantum operations and classical communication when distilling a mixed state into a pure entangled state and thus confirm the existence of entanglement monotones that can increase under separable operations. Our finding can also be interpreted as confirming the ability of separable operations to enhance the entanglement of mixed states relative to certain measures, a sensible but important fact that has never been rigorously proven before.
Abstract We study the task of entanglement distillation in the one-shot setting under different classes of quantum operations which extend the set of local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Establishing a general formalism which allows for a straightforward comparison of their exact achievable performance, we relate the fidelity of distillation under these classes of operations with a family of entanglement monotones and the rates of distillation with a class of smoothed entropic quantities based on the hypothesis testing relative entropy. We then characterise exactly the one-shot distillable entanglement of several classes of quantum states and reveal many simplifications in their manipulation. We show in particular that the ε-error one-shot distillable entanglement of any pure state is the same under all sets of operations ranging from one-way LOCC to separability-preserving operations or operations preserving the set of states with positive partial transpose, and can be computed exactly as a quadratically constrained linear program. We establish similar operational equivalences in the distillation of isotropic and maximally correlated states, reducing the computation of the relevant quantities to linear or semidefinite programs. We also show that all considered sets of operations achieve the same performance in environment-assisted entanglement distillation from any state.
We prove, using a method based on map-state duality, lower bounds on entanglement resources needed to deterministically implement a bipartite unitary using separable (SEP) operations, which include LOCC (local operations and classical communication) as a particular case. It is known that the Schmidt rank of an entangled pure state resource cannot be less than the Schmidt rank of the unitary. We prove that if these ranks are equal the resource must be uniformly (maximally) entangled: equal nonzero Schmidt coefficients. Higher rank resources can have less entanglement: we have found numerical examples of Schmidt rank 2 unitaries, which can be deterministically implemented, by either SEP or LOCC, using an entangled resource of two qutrits with less than one ebit of entanglement.