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arXiv:quant-ph/0302093 · Physical Review A

Classes of n -copy undistillable quantum states with negative partial transposition

Somshubhro Bandyopadhyay, Vwani Roychowdhury

Published Aug 28, 2003• 25 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The discovery of entangled quantum states from which one cannot distill pure entanglement constitutes a fundamental recent advance in the field of quantum information. Such bipartite bound-entangled (BE) quantum states could fall into two distinct categories: (1) Inseparable states with positive partial transposition (PPT), and (2) states with negative partial transposition (NPT). While the existence of PPT BE states has been confirmed, only one class of conjectured NPT BE states has been discovered so far. We provide explicit constructions of a variety of multicopy undistillable NPT states, and conjecture that they constitute families of NPT BE states. For example, we show that for every pure state of Schmidt rank greater than or equal to 3, one can construct n-copy undistillable NPT states, for any $n>~1.$ The abundance of such conjectured NPT BE states, we believe, considerably strengthens the notion that being NPT is only a necessary condition for a state to be distillable.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.68.022319

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The discovery of entangled quantum states from which one cannot distill pure entanglement constitutes a fundamental recent advance in the field of quantum information. Such bipartite bound-entangled (BE) quantum states could fall into two distinct categories: (1) Inseparable states with positive partial transposition (PPT), and (2) states with negative partial transposition (NPT). While the existence of PPT BE states has been confirmed, only one class of conjectured NPT BE states has been discovered so far. We provide explicit constructions of a variety of multicopy undistillable NPT states, and conjecture that they constitute families of NPT BE states. For example, we show that for every pure state of Schmidt rank greater than or equal to 3, one can construct n-copy undistillable NPT states, for any n> 1.n>~1.n> 1. The abundance of such conjectured NPT BE states, we believe, considerably strengthens the notion that being NPT is only a necessary condition for a state to be distillable.
We prove the existence of bound entangled states with negative partial transpose (NPT) in any d × d(d ≥ 3) Hilbert space with a simple assumption on Schmidt rank two states. Obviously they belong to the class of conjectured to be bound entangled states by Divincenzo et.al [Phys. Rev. A, 61, 062312(2000)] and by Dür et.al [Phys. Rev. A, 61, 062313(2000)]. PACS number(s): 03.67.Hk, 03.65.Ud. The basic issue on the classification of mixed state entanglement at least on the level of bipartite systems solely depends upon whether there exist bound entangled states or not. The existence of PPT-bound (PPT means positive partial transpose) entangled states [1] and also the existence of NPT N−copy undistillable states [2, 3] for every positive integer N naturally indicates there may exist NPT-bound entangled states. In this work we are able to show the existence of NPT-bound entangled states with a simple assumption on Schmidt rank two states. We first briefly describe the issue and the importance of the problem. In recent years it is found that quantum entanglement is an useful resource in performing several tasks in quantum information theory and quantum communication [4]. Maximally entangled states shared between two parties are essential ingredients in this respect [5]. Now due to the interaction with environment, states are in practice found to be mixed. However there is a process called distillation by which we can distill sometimes maximally entangled
Recently [quant-ph/0608250] again created a lot of interest to prove the existence of bound entangled states with negative partial transpose (NPT) in any d×d(d≥3)d \times d (d \geq 3)d×d(d≥3) Hilbert space. However the proof in quant-ph/0608250 is not complete but it shows some interesting properties of the Schmidt rank two states. In this work we are trying to probe the problem in a different angle considering the work by Dür et.al [Phys. Rev. A, 61, 062313(2000)]. We have assumed that the Schmidt rank two states should satisfy some bounds. Under some assumptions with these bounds one could prove the existence of NPT bound entangled states. We particularly discuss the case of two copy undistillability of the conjectured family of NPT states. Obviously the class of NPT bound entangled states belong to the class of conjectured to be bound entangled states by Divincenzo et.al [Phys. Rev. A, 61, 062312(2000)] and by Dür et.al [Phys. Rev. A, 61, 062313(2000)]. However the problem of existence of NPT bound entangled states still remain open.
Whether entanglement with a negative partial transpose (NPT) can be undistillable is a longstanding open problem. In the canonical family of DiVincenzo \textit{et al.}, the one-copy-undistillable region was conjectured to remain undistillable at all copy numbers. We refute this: in every dimension d≥3d\geq3d≥3, one vertex of this region is two-copy distillable, via an explicit Schmidt-rank-two tight-frame witness. The separation persists on an open set, while other states in the same region are provably two-copy undistillable. Twirling our counterexample into Werner form makes it two-copy undistillable, so this standard reduction can erase finite-copy distillability.
We exhibit a two-parameter family of bipartite mixed states ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\mathrm{bc}},$ in a $d\ensuremath{\bigotimes}d$ Hilbert space, which are negative under partial transposition (NPT), but for which we conjecture that no maximally entangled pure states in $2\ensuremath{\bigotimes}2$ can be distilled by local quantum operations and classical communication (LQ+CC). Evidence for this undistillability is provided by the result that, for certain states in this family, we cannot extract entanglement from any arbitrarily large number of copies of ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\mathrm{bc}}$ using a projection on $2\ensuremath{\bigotimes}2.$ These states are canonical NPT states in the sense that any bipartite mixed state in any dimension with NPT can be reduced by LQ+CC operations to a NPT state of the ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\mathrm{bc}}$ form. We show that the main question about the distillability of mixed states can be formulated as an open mathematical question about the properties of composed positive linear maps.
We construct a class of entangled states in ℋ = ℋA ⊗ ℋB ⊗ ℋC quantum systems with dim ℋA = dim ℋB = dim ℋC = 2 and classify those states with respect to their distillability properties. The states are bound entanglement for the bipartite split (AB) - C. The states are non-positive partial transpose (NPT) entanglement and 1-copy undistillable for the bipartite splits A - (BC) and B - (AC). Moreover, we generalize the results of 2 ⊗ 2 ⊗ 2 systems to the case of 2n ⊗ 2n ⊗ 2n systems.