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arXiv:quant-ph/0107101 · Physical Review A

Efficient entanglement-assisted transformation for bipartite pure states

Somshubhro Bandyopadhyay, Vwani Roychowdhury

Published Mar 21, 2002• 12 citations
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Abstract

We show that entanglement-assisted transformations of bipartite entangled states can be more efficient than catalysis [Jonathan and Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 3566 (1999)], i.e., given two incomparable bipartite states not only can the transformation be enabled by performing collective operations with an auxiliary entangled state, but the entanglement of the auxiliary state itself can be enhanced. We refer to this phenomenon as supercatalysis. We provide results on the properties of supercatalysis and its relationship with catalysis. In particular, we obtain a useful necessary and sufficient condition for catalysis, and provide several sufficient conditions for supercatalysis and study the extent to which entanglement of the auxiliary state can be enhanced via supercatalysis.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.65.042306

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We show that entanglement-assisted transformations of bipartite entangled states can be more efficient than catalysis [Jonathan and Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 3566 (1999)], i.e., given two incomparable bipartite states not only can the transformation be enabled by performing collective operations with an auxiliary entangled state, but the entanglement of the auxiliary state itself can be enhanced. We refer to this phenomenon as supercatalysis. We provide results on the properties of supercatalysis and its relationship with catalysis. In particular, we obtain a useful necessary and sufficient condition for catalysis, and provide several sufficient conditions for supercatalysis and study the extent to which entanglement of the auxiliary state can be enhanced via supercatalysis.
Catalysis refers to the possibility of performing an otherwise impossible local state transformation by sharing an additional state, i.e. a catalyst, which is returned at the end of the protocol. There is a stronger version, known as supercatalysis, in which the borrowed catalyst is returned in an enhanced form, i.e. more entangled. However, this phenomenon has remained little explored. In this work we introduce the supercatalytic entanglement gain as a figure of merit taking values in [0,1] that quantifies the performance of the protocol (with 0 corresponding to the standard case of catalysis and 1 representing the maximal possible gain) and we study in which cases it can be greater than zero and which strategies can maximize it. While it turns out that every catalytic transformation can be implemented in a supercatalytic fashion with entanglement gain equal to 1 if the state that is borrowed is chosen appropriately, other choices can make the gain strictly less than 1 and even 0. In fact, we prove that a large class of catalytic transformations are not fully supercatalyzable, i.e. there is at least one choice of catalyst for which the entanglement gain vanishes. On the other hand, the construction that shows that supercatalysis is always possible with maximal gain uses artificially highly entangled catalysts. For this reason, we also study minimal supercatalysis, where the entanglement content of the borrowed state is constrained in a precise and natural way. While we consider a scenario where we prove it is impossible to have entanglement gain equal to 1 in this case, we show that there exist minimal supercatalytic transformations with gain as close to 1 as desired. We also explore several examples and observe that, although choosing a catalyst with the least possible entanglement is often an optimal strategy for minimal supercatalysis, this is not necessarily always the case.
Entanglement catalysis is a phenomenon that usually enhances the conversion probability in the transformation of entangled states by the temporary involvement of another entangled state (so-called catalyst), where after the process is completed the catalyst is returned to the same state. For some pairs of bipartite pure entangled states, catalysis enables a transformation with unit probability of success, in which case the respective Schmidt coefficients of the states are said to satisfy the trumping relation, a mathematical relation which is an extension of the majorization relation. This paper provides all necessary and sufficient conditions for the trumping and two other associated relations. Using these conditions, the least upper bound of conversion probabilities using catalysis is also obtained. Moreover, best conversion ratios achievable with catalysis are found for transformations involving many copies of states.
We study the mutual catalysis of entanglement transformations, which refers to the fact that each of the two entanglement transformations cannot occur with certainty by local operations and classical communication independently, but both can occur jointly if collective local operations are performed on both of the initial entangled states. We surprisingly find that mutually catalyzed transformations can be realized even in the case when the standard entanglement catalyzed transformations [D. Jonathan and M. B. Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 3566 (1999)] are forbidden.
We prove that any multiple-copy entanglement transformation [S. Bandyopadhyay, V. Roychowdhury, and U. Sen, Phys. Rev. A 65, 052315 (2002)] can be implemented by a suitable entanglement-assisted local transformation [D. Jonathan and M. B. Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 3566 (1999)]. Furthermore, we show that the combination of multiple-copy entanglement transformation and the entanglement-assisted one is still equivalent to the pure entanglement-assisted one. The mathematical structure of multiple-copy entanglement transformations then is carefully investigated. Many interesting properties of multiple-copy entanglement transformations are presented, which exactly coincide with those satisfied by the entanglement-assisted ones. Most interestingly, we show that an arbitrarily large number of copies of state should be considered in multiple-copy entanglement transformations.
We introduce the general catalysts for pure entanglement transformations under local operations and classical communications in such a way that we disregard the profit and loss of entanglement of the catalysts per se. As such, the possibilities of pure entanglement transformations are greatly expanded. Remarkably, we find an interesting phenomenon that, in some situations, incomparable pairs ${| ψ> ,| ϕ> \} $ and ${| χ> ,| χ^{\prime}> \} $ can assist each other mutually so as to realize the transformation ∣ψ>∣χ>→∣ϕ>∣χ′>| ψ> | χ> \to| ϕ> | χ^{\prime}>∣ψ>∣χ>→∣ϕ>∣χ′>. We also design an efficient algorithm to detect whether a k×kk\times kk×k general catalyst exists for a given entanglement transformation. This algorithm can as well be exploited to witness the existence of standard catalysts.
Quantum entanglement is a fundamental resource in quantum information science, commonly consumed to perform tasks like quantum teleportation and quantum key distribution. Entanglement concentration converts partially entangled pure states into nearly perfect Bell pairs. While its efficiency is well understood in the asymptotic limit, practical protocols must operate with finite systems. In this finite regime, and at the low error levels relevant in practice, performance is penalized by corrections that reduce the achievable yield. We investigate whether this fundamental finite-size penalty can be mitigated by an entanglement catalyst: an auxiliary state that aids the transformation but is returned exactly and uncorrupted. Although such a catalyst cannot increase the leading-order asymptotic yield, we show that it fundamentally alters the finite-size scaling. For every bipartite pure state with nonuniform Schmidt coefficients, we exactly determine the optimal second-order correction to the yield and show that catalysis completely overcomes this finite-size penalty.