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Quantum Science and Technology

Towards a quantum algorithm deciding the separability problem

Paweł Horodecki, Michał Banacki, Michał Eckstein, ARTUR K. EKERT

Published May 15, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1088/2058-9565/ae6e6a

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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.
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It is a major problem within the field of Quantum Information whether the state of a system is entangled or separable. Exact methods have been developed for two qubit systems, but for larger systems determining the boundary between separable and entangled states has been shown to be NP-hard. An iterative method has been proposed that creates progressively tighter bounds from each direction, but this method is resource limited, and determining the boundary precisely requires an infinite number of iterations. Further, it is also believed that successive iterations scale badly. Instead, a weighted measure is developed over the delineated subspaces, producing a likelihood function by convex optimization. This presentation describes progress towards understanding and deploying this method in support of experimental work involving entangled states.
Detection of entanglement in quantum states is one of the most important problems in quantum information processing. However, it is one of the most challenging tasks to find a universal scheme which is also desired to be optimal to detect entanglement for all states of a specific class--as always preferred by experimentalists. Although, the topic is well studied at least in case of lower dimensional compound systems, e.g., two-qubit systems, but in the case of continuous variable systems, this remains as an open problem. Even in the case of two-mode Gaussian states, the problem is not fully solved. In our work, we have tried to address this issue. At first, a limited number of Hermitian operators is given to test the necessary and sufficient criterion on the covariance matrix of separable two-mode Gaussian states. Thereafter, we present an interferometric scheme to test the same separability criterion in which the measurements are being done via Stokes-like operators. In such case, we consider only single-copy measurements on a two-mode Gaussian state at a time and the scheme amounts to the full state tomography. We further analyze the robustness of the proposed detection method against experimentally relevant imperfections and demonstrate that the separability test remains reliable under moderate levels of detection inefficiency. Although this latter approach is a linear optics-based one, nevertheless it is not an economic scheme. Resource-wise a more economical scheme than the full state tomography is obtained if we consider measurements on two copies of the state at a time. However, optimality of the scheme is not yet known.
Entanglement monotones, such as the concurrence, are useful tools to characterize quantum correlations in various physical systems. The computation of the concurrence involves, however, difficult optimizations and only for the simplest case of two qubits a closed formula was found by Wootters [Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2245 (1998)]. We show how this approach can be generalized, resulting in lower bounds on the concurrence for higher dimensional systems as well as for multipartite systems. We demonstrate that for certain families of states our results constitute the strongest bipartite entanglement criterion so far; moreover, they allow us to recognize novel families of multiparticle bound entangled states.
The problem of determining whether a given quantum state is entangled lies at the heart of quantum information processing. Despite the many methods---such as the positive partial transpose criterion and the kkk-symmetric extendibility criterion---to tackle this problem, none of them enables a general, practical solution due to the problem's NP-hard complexity. Explicitly, separable states form a high-dimensional convex set of vastly complicated structures. In this work, we build a different separability-entanglement classifier underpinned by machine learning techniques. We use standard tools from machine learning to learn the entanglement feature of arbitrary given quantum states. We perform substantial numerical tests on two-qubit and two-qutrit systems, and the results indicate that our method can outperform the existing methods in generic cases in terms of both speed and accuracy. This opens up avenues to explore quantum entanglement via the machine learning approach.