This review provides a systematic description of the main (qualitative) results concerning entanglement theory in the context of the so called bound entanglement being a physical manifestation of basic limits for entanglement processing and quantum communication.
Abstract An entangled state is bound entangled if one cannot combine any number of copies of the state to a maximally entangled state by using only local operations and classical communication. If one formalizes this notion of bound entanglement, one arrives immediately at four different definitions. In addition, at least three more definitions are commonly used in the literature, in particular in the very first paper on bound entanglement. Here we review critical distillation protocols and we examine how different results from quantum information theory interact in order to prove that all seven definitions are eventually equivalent. Our self-contained analysis unifies and extends previous results scattered in the literature and reveals details of the structure of bound entanglement.
Bound entanglement is a special form of quantum entanglement that cannot be used for distillation, i.e. the local transformation of copies of arbitrarily entangled states into a smaller number of approximately maximally entangled states. Implying an inherent irreversibility of quantum resources, this phenomenon highlights the gaps in our current theory of entanglement. This review provides a comprehensive exploration of the key findings on bipartite bound entanglement. We focus on systems of finite dimensions, an area of high relevance for many quantum information processing tasks. We elucidate the properties of bound entanglement and its interconnections with various facets of quantum information theory and quantum information processing. The paper highlights areas where our understanding of bound entangled states, particularly in their detection and characterization, remains underdeveloped. By highlighting the need for further research into this phenomenon and underscoring relevant open questions, this paper invites researchers to unravel its relevance for our understanding of entanglement in Nature and how this resource can most effectively be used for applications in quantum technology.
The traditional perspective in quantum resource theories concerns how to use free operations to convert one resourceful quantum state to another one. For example, a fundamental and well known question in entanglement theory is to determine the distillable entanglement of a bipartite state, which is equal to the maximum rate at which fresh Bell states can be distilled from many copies of a given bipartite state by employing local operations and classical communication for free. It is the aim of this paper to take this kind of question to the next level, with the main question being: What is the best way of using free channels to convert one resourceful quantum channel to another? Here we focus on the the resource theory of entanglement for bipartite channels and establish several fundamental tasks and results regarding it. In particular, we establish bounds on several pertinent information processing tasks in channel entanglement theory, and we define several entanglement measures for bipartite channels, including the logarithmic negativity and the κ-entanglement. We also show that the max-Rains information of [Bäuml et al., Physical Review Letters, 121, 250504 (2018)] has a divergence interpretation, which is helpful for simplifying the results of this earlier work.