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arXiv:quant-ph/0001001 · Physical Review A

Four-party unlockable bound entangled state

John A. Smolin

Published Feb 9, 2001• 182 citations
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Abstract

I present a four-party unlockable bound entangled state, that is, a four-party quantum state which cannot be written in a separable form and from which no pure entanglement can be distilled by local quantum operations and classical communication among the parties, and yet when any two of the parties come together in the same laboratory they can perform a measurement which enables the other two parties to create a pure maximally entangled state between them without coming together. This unlocking ability can be viewed in two ways, either as a determination of which Bell state is shared in the mixture or as a kind of quantum teleportation with cancellation of Pauli operators.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.63.032306

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I present a four-party unlockable bound entangled state, that is, a four-party quantum state which cannot be written in a separable form and from which no pure entanglement can be distilled by local quantum operations and classical communication among the parties, and yet when any two of the parties come together in the same laboratory they can perform a measurement which enables the other two parties to create a pure maximally entangled state between them without coming together. This unlocking ability can be viewed in two ways, either as a determination of which Bell state is shared in the mixture or as a kind of quantum teleportation with cancellation of Pauli operators.
We find an interesting relationship between multipartite bound entangled states and the stabilizer formalism. We prove that, if a set of commuting operators from the generalized Pauli group on nnn qudits satisfy certain constraints, then the maximally mixed state over the subspace stabilized by them is an unlockable bound entangled state. Moreover, the properties of this state, such as symmetry under permutations of parties, undistillability, and unlockability, can be easily explained from the stabilizer formalism without tedious calculation. In particular, the four-qubit Smolin state [Smolin, Phys. Rev. A 63, 032306 (2001)] and its recent generalization to even numbers of qubits [Bandyopadhyay et al., Phys. Rev. A 71, 062317 (2005); Augusiak et al., ibid 73, 012318 (2006)] can be viewed as special examples of our results. Finally, we extend our results to arbitrary multipartite systems in which the dimensions of all parties may be different.
More than two multipartite orthogonal states cannot always be discriminated if only local operations and classical communication (LOCC) are allowed. We show that four Bell states cannot be discriminated by LOCC, even probabilistically, using the separability properties of a four-party unlockable bound entangled state. Using an existing inequality among the measures of entanglement, we show that any three Bell states cannot be discriminated with certainty by LOCC. Exploiting the inequality, we calculate the distillable entanglement of a certain class of 4 multiply sign in circle 4 mixed states.
Bound entangled states are states that are entangled but from which no entanglement can be distilled if all parties are allowed only local operations and classical communication. However, in creating these states one needs nonzero entanglement resources to start with. Here, the entanglement of two distinct multipartite bound entangled states is determined analytically in terms of a geometric measure of entanglement and a related quantity. The results are compared with those for the negativity and the relative entropy of entanglement.
A class of unlockable bound entangled states and their applications are presented. They can be considered as quasi generalized Smolin states [Phys. Rev. A 63 (2001) 032306], which are the states of N + N qubits. No pure entanglement can be distilled from this class of states by local quantum operations and classical communications. However, if certain parties group together, they become distillable. Although they are bound entangled states, they could be used to achieve some non-trivial tasks, such as quantum secret sharing shown in the study.