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arXiv:quant-ph/0112131 · Physical Review Letters

Entanglement Cost of Bipartite Mixed States

Guifré Vidal, Wolfgang Dür, J. I. Cirac

Published Jun 20, 2002• 149 citations
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Abstract

We compute the entanglement cost of several families of bipartite mixed states, including arbitrary mixtures of two Bell states. This is achieved by developing a technique that allows us to ascertain the additivity of the entanglement of formation for any state supported on specific subspaces. As a side result, the proof of the irreversibility in asymptotic local manipulations of entanglement is extended to two-qubit systems.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.89.027901

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We compute the entanglement cost of several families of bipartite mixed states, including arbitrary mixtures of two Bell states. This is achieved by developing a technique that allows us to ascertain the additivity of the entanglement of formation for any state supported on specific subspaces. As a side result, the proof of the irreversibility in asymptotic local manipulations of entanglement is extended to two-qubit systems.
Entanglement cost is the asymptotic rate of Bell pairs required to prepare a quantum state. Its regularized definition has made exact evaluation difficult, even for isotropic states (i.e., depolarized maximally entangled states). In this work, we determine the entanglement cost of every qubit isotropic state and, more generally, every two-qubit Bell-diagonal state. Our proof uses a family of suitably tuned qubit semigroups to transform a general log-Sobolev entropy bound into supporting lines of Wootters' function. A recent exact tensorization theorem of Dong et al. [arXiv:2606.17729] extends these bounds to arbitrarily many copies, yielding a general lower bound on entanglement cost. Matching this bound with the entanglement of formation also determines the exact cost for a broader class of two-qubit states. For qudit isotropic states, we derive another general lower bound from the full depolarizing 2→32\to 32→3 norm. This bound substantially improves on the PPT-relative entropy of entanglement and nearly matches the entanglement of formation, leaving a gap of at most 2%2\%2% of log⁡d\log dlogd that vanishes as ddd grows. Finally, the exact qubit results and qudit bounds extend to the entanglement cost of preparing quantum depolarizing channels under both parallel and sequential strategies.
We investigate the asymptotic rates of entanglement transformations for bipartite mixed states by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We analyze the relations between the rates for different transitions and obtain simple lower and upper bounds for these transitions. In a transition from one mixed state to another and back, the amount of irreversibility can be different for different target states. Thus in a natural way, we get the concept of ``amount'' of irreversibility in asymptotic manipulations of entanglement. We investigate the behavior of these transformation rates for different target states. We show that with respect to asymptotic transition rates under LOCC, the maximally entangled states do not have a special status. In the process, we obtain that the entanglement of formation is additive for all maximally correlated states. This allows us to show irreversibility in asymptotic entanglement manipulations for maximally correlated states in $2\ensuremath{\bigotimes}2.$ We also show that the possible nonequality of distillable entanglement under LOCC and that under operations preserving the positivity of partial transposition is related to the behavior of the transitions (under LOCC) to separable target states.
We present a conjugate gradient method for calculating the entanglement of formation of arbitrary mixed quantum states of any dimension and with any bipartite division of the Hilbert space. The development of the gradient used by the algorithm, its implications for the number of states required in the optimal decomposition, and the way that conjugate gradient minimization has been adapted for this particular problem are outlined. We have found that the algorithm exhibits linear convergence for general mixed states, and that it correctly reproduces the known results for pairs of qubits and for isotropic states. The results of an example application of the code are discussed: calculating the entanglement of formation of a Psi+ Bell state of two qutrits when one of those qutrits is subject to various decoherence channels. The results for qutrits are contrasted with those for qubits: for the types of decoherence considered here, qutrit entanglement appears to be more robust than qubit entanglement.
The entanglement of a pure state of a pair of quantum systems is defined as the entropy of either member of the pair. The entanglement of formation of a mixed state $\ensuremath{\rho}$ is the minimum average entanglement of an ensemble of pure states that represents \ensuremath{\rho}. An earlier paper conjectured an explicit formula for the entanglement of formation of a pair of binary quantum objects (qubits) as a function of their density matrix, and proved the formula for special states. The present paper extends the proof to arbitrary states of this system and shows how to construct entanglement-minimizing decompositions.