Nonlocality without entanglement is an interesting field. A manifestation of quantum nonlocality without entanglement is the possible local indistinguishability of orthogonal product states. In this paper we analyze the character of operators to distinguish the elements of a full product basis set in a multipartite system, and show that distinguishing perfectly these product bases needs only local projective measurements and classical communication, and these measurements cannot damage each product basis. Employing these conclusions one can discuss local distinguishability of the elements of any full product basis set easily. Finally we discuss the generalization of these results to the locally distinguishability of the elements of incomplete product basis set.
Nonlocality without entanglement is an interesting field. A manifestation of quantum nonlocality without entanglement is the possible local indistinguishability of orthogonal product states. In this paper we analyze the character of operators to distinguish the elements of a full product basis set in a multipartite system, and show that distinguishing perfectly these product bases needs only local projective measurements and classical communication, and these measurements cannot damage each product basis. Employing these conclusions one can discuss local distinguishability of the elements of any full product basis set easily. Finally we discuss the generalization of these results to the locally distinguishability of the elements of incomplete product basis set.
A set of orthogonal product states is said to exhibit "quantum nonlocality without entanglement" if it is locally indistinguishable, i.e. no sequence of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) can perfectly discriminate the states. Building on this foundational idea, recent studies have highlighted the phenomenon of "genuine activation of hidden nonlocality", where a set of initially distinguishable orthogonal states becomes locally indistinguishable through orthogonality-preserving LOCC transformations. In this letter, we establish that any complete orthogonal product basis that is initially locally distinguishable remains so under all orthogonality-preserving local projective measurements, thereby ruling out activation via orthogonality-preserving local projective measurements and classical communication. We further introduce and formalise the notions of "strongly local sets", namely locally distinguishable sets that remain non-activable under all bipartitions. Interestingly, the study of "local activability" of distinguishable sets is useful to characterise the boundary between LOCC distinguishability and its irreversible loss in multipartite systems. Our results provide a rigorous structural understanding of local-to-nonlocal transitions in quantum state discrimination.
It is known that there exist sets of pure orthogonal product states which cannot be perfectly distinguished by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Such sets are nonlocal sets which exhibit nonlocality without entanglement. These nonlocal sets can be completable or uncompletable. In this work both completable and uncompletable small nonlocal sets of multipartite orthogonal product states are constructed. Apart from nonlocality, these sets have other interesting properties. In particular, the completable sets lead to the construction of a class of complete orthogonal product bases with the property that if such a basis is given then no state can be eliminated from that basis by performing orthogonality-preserving measurements. On the other hand, an uncompletable set of the present kind contains several Shifts unextendible product bases (UPBs) that belong to qubit subspaces. Identifying these subspace UPBs, it is possible to obtain a class of high-dimensional multipartite bound entangled states. Finally, it is shown that a two-qubit maximally entangled Bell state shared between any two parties is sufficient as a resource to distinguish the states of any completable set (of the above kind) perfectly by LOCC. This constitutes an example where the amount of entanglement, sufficient to accomplish the aforesaid task, depends neither on the dimension of the individual subsystems nor on the number of parties.
Quantum nonlocality is usually associated with entangled states by their violations of Bell-type inequalities. However, even unentangled systems, whose parts may have been prepared separately, can show nonlocal properties. In particular, a set of product states is said to exhibit "quantum nonlocality without entanglement" if the states are locally indistinguishable; i.e., it is not possible to optimally distinguish the states by any sequence of local operations and classical communication. Here, we present a stronger manifestation of this kind of nonlocality in multiparty systems through the notion of local irreducibility. A set of multiparty orthogonal quantum states is defined to be locally irreducible if it is not possible to locally eliminate one or more states from the set while preserving orthogonality of the postmeasurement states. Such a set, by definition, is locally indistinguishable, but we show that the converse does not always hold. We provide the first examples of orthogonal product bases on C^{d}⊗C^{d}⊗C^{d} for d=3, 4 that are locally irreducible in all bipartitions, where the construction for d=3 achieves the minimum dimension necessary for such product states to exist. The existence of such product bases implies that local implementation of a multiparty separable measurement may require entangled resources across all bipartitions.
Local distinguishability of orthogonal quantum states is an area of active research in quantum information theory. However, most of the relevant results are about local distinguishability in bipartite Hilbert space and very little is known about the multipartite case. In this paper we present a generic method to construct a completable n-partite $(n\ensuremath{\ge}3)$ product basis with only 2n members, which exhibits nonlocality without entanglement with n parties, each holding a system of any finite dimension. We give an effective proof of the nonlocality of the completable multipartite product basis. In addition, we construct another incomplete multipartite product basis with a smaller number of members that cannot be distinguished by local operations and classical communication in a ${d}_{1}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{d}_{2}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}\ensuremath{\cdots}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{d}_{n}$ quantum system, where $n\ensuremath{\ge}3$ and ${d}_{i}\ensuremath{\ge}2$ for i=1,2,...,n. The results can lead to a better understanding of the phenomenon of nonlocality without entanglement in any multipartite quantum system.
For general bipartite quantum systems, many sets of locally indistinguishable orthogonal product states have been constructed so far. Here, we first present a general method to construct multipartite orthogonal product states in ${d}_{1}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{d}_{2}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}\ensuremath{\cdots}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{d}_{n}({d}_{1,2,\ensuremath{\cdots},n}\ensuremath{\ge}3,n\ensuremath{\ge}4)$ by using some locally indistinguishable bipartite orthogonal product states. And we prove that these multipartite orthogonal quantum states cannot be distinguished by local operations and classical communication. Furthermore, in ${d}_{1}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{d}_{2}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}\ensuremath{\cdots}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{d}_{n}({d}_{1,2,\ensuremath{\cdots},n}\ensuremath{\ge}3,n\ensuremath{\ge}5)$, we give a general method to construct a much smaller number of locally indistinguishable multipartite orthogonal product states for even and odd n separately. In addition, we also present a general method to construct complete orthogonal product bases for the multipartite quantum systems. Our results demonstrate the phenomenon of nonlocality without entanglement for the multipartite quantum systems.
We study the local distinguishability of general multiqubit states and show that local projective measurements and classical communication are as powerful as the most general local measurements and classical communication. Remarkably, this indicates that the local distinguishability of multiqubit states can be decided efficiently. Another useful consequence is that a set of orthogonal n-qubit states is locally distinguishable only if the summation of their orthogonal Schmidt numbers is less than the total dimension 2n. Employing these results, we show that any orthonormal basis of a subspace spanned by arbitrary three-qubit orthogonal unextendible product bases (UPB) cannot be exactly distinguishable by local operations and classical communication. This not only reveals another intrinsic property of three-qubit orthogonal UPB but also provides a class of locally indistinguishable subspaces with dimension 4. We also explicitly construct locally indistinguishable subspaces with dimensions 3 and 5, respectively. Similar to the bipartite case, these results on multipartite locally indistinguishable subspaces can be used to estimate the one-shot environment-assisted classical capacity of a class of quantum broadcast channels.