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Entanglement without Tomography: A Rankwise Study

Gaurav Chaudhary, V. Ravishankar

Published Mar 23, 2014• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Experimental determination of entanglement is important not only to characterize the state and use it in quantum information, but also in understanding complicated phenomena such as phase transitions. In this paper we show that in many cases, it is possible to determine entanglement of a two qubit state, as represented by concurrence, with a few observables, most of which are local. In particular, rank 1 and rank 2 states need exclusively measurement of local observables while rank 3 states need measurement of just one correlation observable in addition to local observables. Only the rank 4 states are shown to require a more detailed tomography. The analysis also sheds light on the other measure, non separability since it is a lower bound on concurrence.

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Experimental determination of entanglement is important not only to characterize the state and use it in quantum information, but also in understanding complicated phenomena such as phase transitions. In this paper we show that in many cases, it is possible to determine entanglement of a two qubit state, as represented by concurrence, with a few observables, most of which are local. In particular, rank 1 and rank 2 states need exclusively measurement of local observables while rank 3 states need measurement of just one correlation observable in addition to local observables. Only the rank 4 states are shown to require a more detailed tomography. The analysis also sheds light on the other measure, non separability since it is a lower bound on concurrence.
Entanglement is the crucial resource in the field of quantum information processing and consequently a better understanding of its properties is very desirable. While for bipartite entangled qubit states many tools for characterization exist and also the experimental implementation of the tools is feasible, the situation for multipartite entangled states is different: The available tools have to be suited for a much greater diversity of entanglement properties, e.g. to analyze all the different entanglement classes [1]. A full experimental characterization via state tomography is increasingly difficult as the number of necessary measurement settings grows exponentially with the number of particles. In this contribution we focus on efficient, non-tomographic methods to characterize experimentally observed, multipartite entangled states. First steps towards this goal were demonstrated recently, for instance, for the proof of genuine multipartite entanglement [2] or for the analysis of the persistency of entanglement under loss [3]. Such methods can be further optimized by tailoring them to particular properties of states. We show how three important characteristic quantities, the fidelity, the non-separability and the permutation symmetry, can be evaluated with a significantly lower number of measurement settings than required for a complete tomography. Although the determination of these particular properties provides less information than the reconstruction of the complete density matrix, it allows to judge how well state characteristics are reproduced experimentally. This might be important with respect to an experimental application of states in quantum information. Exemplarily we apply the analysis tools to two genuinely four-qubit entangled states: the Dicke state with two excitations |D 4 〉 [4] and the cluster state |C4 〉 [5, 6]. These states are relevant for particular tasks: The state |D 4 〉 is a resource for telecloning [7], cluster states find an application in one-way quantum computation [6, 8] and are a subgroup of graph states, which play an important role for quantum error correction.
Quantum computation depends on quantum entanglement, a correlation between subsystems that cannot occur classically. A variety of theoretical measures exist for quantifying the degree entanglement in such schemes, all of which are functions of the system density matrix. How can the entanglement be measured experimentally? Using quantum tomography techniques developed for two photon entangled states, the density matrix can be reconstructed from the appropriate experimental data. In this case the state tomography gives the complete characterization of the physical system (for the relevant degree of freedom, such as spin or polarization). It gives information on both the degree of nonclassical correlation, that is entanglement, as well as the amount of decoherence in the system. In this proceedings we discuss the general state tomography procedure required to characterize a few qubit quantum computer, for any architecture.
ventional full state tomography reaches its limit already for a few qubits and hence novel methods for the verification and benchmarking of quantum devices are called for. We show how the complete reconstruction of density matrices is possible even if one relies only on local information about the state. This results in an experimental effort that is linear in the number of qubits and efficient post-processing – in stark contrast to the exponential scaling of standard tomography. Whenever full tomography is not needed but instead less information required, one would expect that even fewer measurements suffice. Taking entanglement content of solid state samples and bosons in lattices as an example, we show how it may be quantified unconditionally using already routinely performed measurements only.
We propose a measure of two-qubit entanglement that is invariant under local unitary transformations, and which is based on local measurements covariances. It measures the Hilbert-Schmidt distance between the state and the product state obtained by multiplying the local density matrices. The measure has the benefit that the experimentalist need not have any a priori knowledge of the state to make the measurements. For pure states, the measure provides the state's concurrence directly, without resorting to state tomography. For statistically mixed states, the measure provides bounds for the concurrence. The two-qutrit case is also studied.
Abstract Determining whether an unknown quantum state is entangled can be approached through quantum tomography and related algorithms. However, these methods are generally inefficient due to the NP-hardness of the problem. An alternative strategy is to treat it as a decision (or estimation) problem with a quantum data structure (Horodecki and Ekert 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 127902). Over the years, significant progress has been made: the two-qubit case is now fully understood, but for higher-dimensional systems only entanglement detection via negativity has been established. In this work, we propose schemes for measuring upper bounds on bipartite biconcurrence and concurrence, expressed as functions of a fixed (but arbitrary) unitary operation acting on a Hilbert space that is quadratically larger than the original state space. Independently, we provide a scheme for measuring a lower bound for concurrence. In the case of the states proportional to the projectors the schemes are getting significantly simpler and the upper bound on the biconcurrence, as well as the lower bound on the concurrence, become exact (up to experimental and numerical errors). This framework opens the door to tackling the separability problem using methods inspired by the variational quantum eigensolver.