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arXiv:quant-ph/0107051 · Physical Review A

Irreversibility in asymptotic manipulations of a distillable entangled state

Guifré Vidal, J. I. Cirac

Published Dec 14, 2001• 18 citations
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Abstract

We provide an example of a distillable bipartite mixed state such that, even in the asymptotic limit, more pure-state entanglement is required to create it than can be distilled from it. Thus, we show that the irreversibility in the processes of formation and distillation of bipartite states, recently proved in [G. Vidal and J. I. Cirac, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 5803 (2001)], is not limited to bound-entangled states.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.65.012323

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We provide an example of a distillable bipartite mixed state such that, even in the asymptotic limit, more pure-state entanglement is required to create it than can be distilled from it. Thus, we show that the irreversibility in the processes of formation and distillation of bipartite states, recently proved in [G. Vidal and J. I. Cirac, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 5803 (2001)], is not limited to bound-entangled states.
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.
The manipulation of quantum entanglement is fundamentally irreversible: some mixed entangled states require pure entanglement for their preparation, although no pure entanglement can be recovered from them by local operations and classical communication. This irreversibility is known to persist even under the maximal class of operations that do not generate entanglement, revealing a fundamental distinction between entanglement theory and thermodynamics. We construct cases for which any attempt to restore reversibility necessarily incurs an error that increases exponentially with the number of copies. Technically, we demonstrate a strict separation between the exponential strong-converse distillable entanglement and the exponential strong-converse entanglement cost. Our result resolves a conjecture posed by Lami and Regula (Nat. Phys. 19, 184-189 (2023)) and strengthens it by showing that the irreversibility of entanglement persists even at the level of polynomially (in the number of copies) growing error. We further derive a semidefinite-programming lower bound on the exponential strong-converse cost under non-entangling operations. Finally, for the class of completely PPT-preserving operations, we construct analytically solvable families of antisymmetric states exhibiting the exponential strong-converse irreversibility. Remarkably, to our knowledge, no analogous separation between exponential strong converse cost and the analogous distillable entanglement is currently known even under the more restrictive class of LOCC operations.
We investigate the irreversibility of entanglement distillation for a symmetric (d+1)(d+1)(d+1)-parameter family of mixed bipartite quantum states acting on Hilbert spaces of arbitrary dimension $d\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}d$. We prove that in this family the entanglement cost is generically strictly larger than the distillable entanglement, so that the set of states for which the distillation process is asymptotically reversible is of measure zero. This remains true even if the distillation process is catalytically assisted by pure-state entanglement and every operation is allowed, which preserves the positivity of the partial transpose. It is shown that reversibility occurs only in cases where the state is a tagged mixture. The reversible cases are shown to be completely characterized by minimal uncertainty vectors for entropic uncertainty relations.