In their interesting paper [Phys. Rev. A 99, 032312 (2019)], Chen et al. consider the completely symmetric (CS) states, which are invariant under any index permutation. They proved that the CS states are separable if and only if they are a convex combination of real symmetric pure product states in Theorem 14, and claimed that any CS state in a two-qutrit system is separable in Theorem 20. We point out that their proof of Theorem 20 is flawed because of invalid assumptions. Furthermore, we present a sufficient and necessary condition for the separability of the CS states in two-qutrit systems.
The author of the Comment [Phys. Rev. A 104, 016401 (2021)] pointed out the missing part in the proof of Theorem 20 in our work [L. Qian et al., Phys. Rev. A 99, 032312 (2019)], and presented a sufficient and necessary condition for the separability of completely symmetric (CS) states in the two-qutrit system. While being technically correct, the proposed example is still a separable CS state according to Ha's sufficient and necessary condition. We provide another proof to show that every bipartite CS state of rank five is separable. This result bridges the gap appearing in our previous proof. It turns out that every two-qutrit CS state is separable, and thus making our conclusion (Theorem 20 of our work) still valid.
Symmetry plays an important role in the field of quantum mechanics. We consider a subclass of symmetric quantum states in the multipartite system ${N}^{\ensuremath{\bigotimes}d}$, namely, the completely symmetric states, which are invariant under any index permutation. It was hypothesized by L. Qian and D. Chu (arXiv:1810.03125 [quant-ph]) that the completely symmetric states are separable if and only if it is a convex combination of symmetric pure product states. We prove that this conjecture is true for the both bipartite and multipartite cases. Further, we prove that the completely symmetric state $\ensuremath{\rho}$ is separable if its rank is at most 5 or
N+1. For the states of rank 6 or
N+2, they are separable if and only if their range contains a product vector. We apply our results to a few widely useful states in quantum information, such as symmetric states, edge states, extreme states, and non-negative states. We also study the relation of completely symmetric states to Hankel and Toeplitz matrices.
For multipartite states, we consider a notion of
D symmetry. For a system of
N qubits, it coincides with the usual permutational symmetry. In the case of
N qudits ($d\ensuremath{\ge}3$), the
D symmetry is stronger than the permutational one. For the space of all
D-symmetric vectors in ${({\mathbb{C}}^{d})}^{\ensuremath{\bigotimes}N}$, we define a basis composed of vectors ${|{R}_{N,d;k}\ensuremath{\rangle}:\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}0\ensuremath{\le}k\ensuremath{\le}N(d\ensuremath{-}1)}$ which are analogs of Dicke states. The aim of this paper is to discuss the problem of separability of
D-symmetric states which are diagonal in the basis ${|{R}_{N,d;k}\ensuremath{\rangle}}$. We show that if
N is even and $d\ensuremath{\ge}2$ is arbitrary then a positive partial transposition property is a necessary and sufficient condition of separability for
D-invariant diagonal states. In this way, we generalize results obtained by Yu [Phys. Rev. A 94, 060101(R) (2016)] and Wolfe and Yelin [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 140402 (2014)]. Our strategy is to use some classical mathematical results on a moment problem.
In this paper, we study the distinguishability of multipartite quantum states by separable operations. We first present a necessary and sufficient condition for a finite set of orthogonal quantum states to be distinguishable by separable operations. An analytical version of this condition is derived for the case of(D-1) pure states, whereDis the total dimension of the state space under consideration. A number of interesting consequences of this result are then carefully investigated. Remarkably, we show there exists a large class of 2 otimes 2 separable operations not being realizable by local operations and classical communication. Before our work, only a class of 3 otimes 3 nonlocal separable operations was known [Bennett , Phys. Rev. A 59, 1070 (1999)]. We also show that any basis of the orthogonal complement of a multipartite pure state is indistinguishable by separable operations if and only if this state cannot be a superposition of one or two orthogonal product states, i.e., has an orthogonal Schmidt number not less than three, thus generalize the recent work about indistinguishable bipartite subspaces [Watrous, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 080505 (2005)]. Notably, we obtain an explicit construction of indistinguishable subspaces of dimension 7 (or 6) by considering a composite quantum system consisting of two qutrits (resp., three qubits), which is slightly better than the previously known indistinguishable bipartite subspace with dimension 8.
In this paper, we consider a subclass of quantum states in the multipartite system, namely, the supersymmetric states. We investigate the problem whether they admit the symmetrically separable decomposition, i.e., each term in this decomposition is a supersymmetric pure product state
∣x,x⟩⟨x,x∣, which are called S-separable. We conjecture that any supersymmetric states are S-separable and we prove that this conjecture holds when the rank is less than or equal to 3 or
N. Moreover, we propose another weaker conjecture that any separable supersymmetric states are S-separable. It was proved to be true when the rank is less than or equal to
4 or
N+1. We also propose a numerical algorithm which is able to detect S-separability. Besides, we analysis the convergence behavior of this algorithm. Some numerical examples are tested to show the effectiveness of the algorithm.
The structural study of entanglement in multipartite systems is hindered by the lack of necessary and sufficient operational criteria able to discriminate among the various entanglement properties of a given mixed state. Here, we pursue a different route to the study of multipartite entanglement based on the closeness of a multipartite state to the set of separable ones. In particular, we analyze multipartite diagonal symmetric N qubit states and provide the analytical expression for their Best Separable Approximation (BSA [Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2261 (1998)]), that is, their unique convex decomposition into a separable part and an entangled one with maximal weight of the separable one.