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Chinese Physics B

A new class of states of reversible entanglement manipulation under positive partial transpose operations

Jing Duan, Yu Luo, Yongming Li

Published Nov 1, 2018• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We first study the reversibility for a class of states under the operations which completely preserve the positivity of partial transpose (PPT) and show that the entanglement cost is equal to the distillable entanglement for a rank-two mixed state on the 4⊗4 antisymmetric subspace under PPT operations. By using a similar method in finding the irreversibility, we also find that the value of a new efficiently computable additive lower bound E η ( ρ ) for the asymptotic PPT-relative entropy of entanglement presented in [ Phys. Rev. Lett. 119 , 180506 (2017)] is equal to the regularized Rains’ bound and an upper bound E N ( ρ ) for distillable entanglement for these states. Furthermore, we find states on the symmetric subspace satisfying the relation mentioned above, generalize the antisymmetric states and symmetric states in higher dimensions, and give a specific value for distillable entanglement and entanglement cost for these states under the PPT operations.

DOI
10.1088/1674-1056/27/11/110305

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We first study the reversibility for a class of states under the operations which completely preserve the positivity of partial transpose (PPT) and show that the entanglement cost is equal to the distillable entanglement for a rank-two mixed state on the 4⊗4 antisymmetric subspace under PPT operations. By using a similar method in finding the irreversibility, we also find that the value of a new efficiently computable additive lower bound E η ( ρ ) for the asymptotic PPT-relative entropy of entanglement presented in [ Phys. Rev. Lett. 119 , 180506 (2017)] is equal to the regularized Rains’ bound and an upper bound E N ( ρ ) for distillable entanglement for these states. Furthermore, we find states on the symmetric subspace satisfying the relation mentioned above, generalize the antisymmetric states and symmetric states in higher dimensions, and give a specific value for distillable entanglement and entanglement cost for these states under the PPT operations.
We demonstrate the irreversibility of asymptotic entanglement manipulation under quantum operations that completely preserve the positivity of partial transpose (PPT), resolving a major open problem in quantum information theory. Our key tool is a new efficiently computable additive lower bound for the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement with respect to PPT states, which can be used to evaluate the entanglement cost under local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We find that for any rank-two mixed state supporting on the 3⊗3 antisymmetric subspace, the amount of distillable entanglement by PPT operations is strictly smaller than one entanglement bit (ebit) while its entanglement cost under PPT operations is exactly one ebit. As a by-product, we find that for this class of states, both the Rains's bound and its regularization are strictly less than the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement. So, in general, there is no unique entanglement measure for the manipulation of entanglement by PPT operations. We further show a computable sufficient condition for the irreversibility of entanglement distillation by LOCC (or PPT) operations.
We study entanglement distillation under operations that remain completely positive under partial-transpose conjugation, a.k.a. PPT channels, in the standard quantum Shannon theory regime of asymptotically vanishing but non-zero error. Our main results are: (a) a regularised formula for the PPT distillable entanglement in terms of a measured-relative-entropy-like quantity; and (b) two different single-letter converses, one based on operator quadratic forms and the other on Hirschman's strengthening of the Hadamard three-line theorem. As an immediate application of (b), we show that the PPT distillable entanglement can be strictly smaller than the regularised Rains bound, thereby resolving an open problem in the theory of entanglement manipulation [Regula et al., NJP 21:103017, 2019]. A gap appears already for 3×33\times 33×3 Werner states: at antisymmetric weight 25/2625/2625/26, a certified upper bound of 0.621070.621070.62107 ebits lies below the (regularised) Rains bound, which equals 2526log⁡25−log⁡23≈0.64766\frac{25}{26} \log_2 5 - \log_2 3 \approx 0.647662625​log2​5−log2​3≈0.64766 ebits. On a different note, (a) implies a faithful lower bound on the PPT distillable entanglement in terms of the entanglement negativity, which provides a quantitative counterpart to the qualitatively known fact that any NPT state is PPT distillable [Eggeling et al., PRL 87:257902, 2001].
Rains' bound is arguably the best known upper bound of the distillable entanglement by operations completely preserving positivity of partial transpose (PPT) and was conjectured to be additive and coincide with the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement. We disprove both conjectures by explicitly constructing a special class of mixed two-qubit states. We then introduce an additive semidefinite programming lower bound (EM{E}_{M}EM​) for the asymptotic Rains' bound, and it immediately becomes a computable lower bound for entanglement cost of bipartite states. Furthermore, EM{E}_{M}EM​ is also proved to be the best known upper bound of the PPT-assisted deterministic distillable entanglement and gives the asymptotic rates for all pure states and some class of genuinely mixed states.
Quantum catalysts can overcome otherwise impossible quantum state transformations without being consumed, and allowing them to become correlated with the output makes this assistance substantially more powerful. This raises a fundamental question for entanglement theory: which limitations on state manipulation remain when such correlated catalysts are freely available? We answer this question in the positive-partial-transpose (PPT) resource theory, which allows a substantially broader class of operations than local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We identify general conditions under which regularized relative-entropy measures become strongly superadditive, and use them to construct monotones that constrain correlated catalytic PPT transformations without any knowledge of the catalyst. In particular, we prove that the regularized PPT relative entropy is fully additive and strongly superadditive, resolving an open problem in entanglement theory. Most importantly, these constraints show that even arbitrary correlated catalysts cannot restore asymptotic reversibility: for an explicit state, the optimal entanglement distillation rate remains strictly smaller than the entanglement cost. Thus, substantial catalytic assistance does not remove some of the fundamental limitations of mixed-state entanglement manipulation.
Quantifying the minimum entanglement needed to prepare quantum states and implement quantum processes is a key challenge in quantum information theory. In this Letter, we develop computable and faithful lower bounds on the entanglement cost under quantum operations that completely preserve the positivity of partial transpose (PPT operations), by introducing the generalized divergence of k-negativity, a generalization of logarithmic negativity. Our bounds are efficiently computable via semidefinite programming and provide nontrivial values for all states that are non-PPT (NPT), establishing their faithfulness for the resource theory of NPT entanglement. Notably, we find and affirm the irreversibility of asymptotic entanglement manipulation under PPT operations for full-rank entangled states. Furthermore, we extend our methodology to derive lower bounds on the entanglement cost of both point-to-point and bipartite quantum channels. Our bound demonstrates improvements over previously known computable bounds for a wide range of quantum states and channels. These findings push the boundaries of understanding the structure of entanglement and the fundamental limits of entanglement manipulation.
Quantum information theory is plagued by the problem of regularizations, which require the evaluation of formidable asymptotic quantities. This makes it computationally intractable to gain a precise quantitative understanding of the ultimate efficiency of key operational tasks such as entanglement manipulation. Here, we consider the problem of computing the asymptotic entanglement cost of preparing noisy quantum states under quantum operations with positive partial transpose (PPT). By means of an analytical example, a previously claimed solution to this problem is shown to be incorrect. Building on a previous characterization of the PPT entanglement cost in terms of a regularized formula, we construct instead a hierarchy of semidefinite programs that bypasses the issue of regularization altogether, and converges to the true asymptotic value of the entanglement cost. Our main result establishes that this convergence happens exponentially fast, thus yielding an efficient algorithm that approximates the cost up to an additive error ϵ in time poly(D,log(1/ϵ)), where D is the underlying Hilbert space dimension. To our knowledge, this is the first time that an asymptotic entanglement measure is shown to be efficiently computable despite no closed-form formula being available.