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arXiv:quant-ph/0010054 · Physical Review Letters

Nonadditivity of Bipartite Distillable Entanglement Follows from a Conjecture on Bound Entangled Werner States

Peter W. Shor, John A. Smolin, Barbara M. Terhal

Published Mar 19, 2001• 147 citations
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Abstract

Assuming the validity of a conjecture given by DiVincenzo et al. [Phys. Rev. A 61, 062312 (2000)] and by Dür et al. [Phys. Rev. A 61, 062313 (2000)], we show that the distillable entanglement for two bipartite states, each of which individually has zero distillable entanglement, can be nonzero. We show that this also implies that the distillable entanglement is not a convex function. Our example consists of the tensor product of a bound entangled state based on an unextendible product basis with an entangled Werner state which lies in the class of conjectured undistillable states.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.86.2681

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We study the relation between violation of Bell inequalities and distillability properties of quantum states. Recently, Dür [Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 230402 (2001)] has shown that there are some multiparticle bound entangled states which are nonseparable and nondistillable, that violate a Bell inequality. We prove that for all the states violating this inequality there exists at least one splitting of the parties into two groups such that some pure-state entanglement can be distilled, obtaining a connection between Bell inequalities and bipartite distillable entanglement.
Equivalence between positive partial transpose (PPT) entanglement and bound entanglement is a long-standing open problem in quantum information theory. Limited progress has been made so far, even on the seemingly simple case of the bound entanglement of Werner states. The primary challenge is to give a concise mathematical representation of undistillability. To this end, we propose a decomposition of the NNN-undistillability verification into log(N)\text{log}(N)log(N) repeated steps of 1-undistillability verification. For Werner states' NNN-undistillability verification, a parameter interval for NNN-undistillability is given, which is independent of the dimensionality of Werner states. Equivalent forms of inequalities for both rank 1 and 2 matrices are presented, before transforming the 2-undistillability case into a matrix analysis problem. A new perspective is also attempted by seeing it as a nonconvex multivariable function, proving its critical points and conjecturing Hessian positivity, which would make them local minimums.
We derive general upper bounds on the distillable entanglement of a mixed state under one-way and two-way local operations and classical communication (LOCC). In both cases, the upper bound is based on a convex decomposition of the state into “useful” and “useless” quantum states. By “useful,” we mean a state whose distillable entanglement is non-negative and equal to its coherent information (and thus given by a single-letter, tractable formula). On the other hand, “useless” states are undistillable, i.e., their distillable entanglement is zero. We prove that in both settings, the distillable entanglement is convex on such decompositions. Hence, an upper bound on the distillable entanglement is obtained from the contributions of the useful states alone, being equal to the convex combination of their coherent informations. Optimizing over all such decompositions of the input state yields our upper bound. The useful and useless states are given by degradable and antidegradable states in the one-way LOCC setting, and by maximally correlated and positive partial transpose (PPT) states in the two-way LOCC setting, respectively. We also illustrate how our method can be extended to quantum channels. Interpreting our upper bound as a convex roof extension, we show that it reduces to a particularly simple, non-convex optimization problem for the classes of isotropic states and Werner states. In the one-way LOCC setting, this non-convex optimization yields an upper bound on the quantum capacity of the qubit depolarizing channel that is strictly tighter than previously known bounds for large values of the depolarizing parameter. In the two-way LOCC setting, the non-convex optimization achieves the PPT-relative entropy of entanglement for both isotropic and Werner states.