We present a notion of generalized entanglement which goes beyond the conventional definition based on quantum subsystems. This is accomplished by directly defining entanglement as a property of quantum states relative to a distinguished set of observables singled out by Physics. While recovering standard entanglement as a special case, our notion allows for substantially broader generality and flexibility, being applicable, in particular, to situations where existing tools are not directly useful.
We present a notion of generalized entanglement which goes beyond the conventional definition based on quantum subsystems. This is accomplished by directly defining entanglement as a property of quantum states relative to a distinguished set of observables singled out by Physics. While recovering standard entanglement as a special case, our notion allows for substantially broader generality and flexibility, being applicable, in particular, to situations where existing tools are not directly useful.
Entanglement plays a pervasive role nowadays throughout quantum information science, and at the same time provides a bridging notion between quantum information science and fields as diverse as condensed-matter theory, quantum gravity, and quantum foundations. In recent years, a notion of ''Generalized Entanglement'' (GE) has emerged, based on the idea that entanglement may be directly defined through expectation values of preferred observables -- without reference to a preferred subsystem decomposition. Preferred observables capture the physically relevant point of view, as defined by dynamical, operational, or fundamental constraints. While reducing to the standard entanglement notion when preferred observables are restricted to arbitrary local observables acting on individual subsystems, GE substantially expands subsystem-based entanglement theories, in terms of both conceptual foundations and range of applicability. Remarkably, the GE framework allows for non-trivial entanglement to exist within a single, indecomposable quantum system, demands in general a distinction between quantum separability and absence of entanglement, and naturally extends to situations where existing approaches may not be directly useful -- such as entanglement in arbitrary convex-cones settings and entanglement for indistinguishable quantum particles. In this paper, we revisit the main motivations leading to GE, and summarize the accomplishments and prospects of the GE program to date, with an eye toward conceptual developments and implications. In particular, we explain how the GE approach both shares strong points of contact with abstract operational quantum theories and, ultimately, calls for an observer-dependent redefinition of concepts like locality, completeness, and reality in quantum theory.
We present a generalization of entanglement based on the idea that entanglement is relative to a distinguished subspace of observables rather than a distinguished subsystem decomposition. A pure quantum state is entangled relative to such a subspace if its expectations are a proper mixture of those of other states. Many information-theoretic aspects of entanglement can be extended to this observable-based setting, suggesting new ways of measuring and classifying multipartite entanglement. By going beyond the distinguishable-subsystem framework, generalized entanglement also provides novel tools for probing quantum correlations in interacting many-body systems.
This paper addresses the following main question: Do we have a theoretical understanding of entanglement applicable to a full variety of physical settings? It is clear that not only the assumption of distinguishability, but also the few-subsystem scenario, are too narrow to embrace all possible physical settings. In particular, the need to go beyond the traditional subsystem-based framework becomes manifest when one tries to apply the conventional concept of entanglement to the physics of matter, since the constituents of a quantum many-body system are indistinguishable particles. We shall discuss here a notion of generalized entanglement, which can be applied to any operator language (fermions, bosons, spins, etc.) used to describe a physical system and which includes the conventional entanglement settings introduced to date in a unified fashion. This is realized by noticing that entanglement is an observer-dependent concept, whose properties are determined by the expectations of a distinguished set of observables without reference to a preferred subsystem decomposition, i.e., it depends on the physically relevant point of view. This viewpoint depends in turn upon the relationship between different sets of observables that determine our ability to control the system of interest. Indeed, the extent to which entanglement is present depends on the observables used to measure a system and describe its states. This represents a most conspicuous advantage as will be highlighted by the condensed-matter application we will discuss.
The notion of entanglement of quantum states is usually defined with respect to a fixed bipartition. Indeed, a global basis change can always map an entangled state to a separable one. The situation is, however, different when considering a set of states. In this work we define the notion of an ``absolutely entangled set'' of quantum states: for any possible choice of global basis, at least one of the states in the set is entangled. Hence, for all bipartitions, i.e., any possible definition of the subsystems, the set features entanglement. We present examples of such sets, including sets with minimal size. Moreover, we propose a quantitative measure for absolute set entanglement. To lower bound this quantity, we develop a method based on polynomial optimization to perform convex optimization over unitaries, which is of independent interest.
In this chapter, we study the properties of quantum entanglement, and more generally the way correlations can appear in quantum mechanics. Quantum entanglement is an important notion that we have already discussed, for instance in the context of the Von Neumann chain or of the Schrödinger cat, but here we give more details on its properties. In classical physics, the notion of correlation is well known. It hinges on the calculation of probabilities and on linear averages over a number of possibilities. A distribution gives the probability of having the first system in a some given state and the second in another state. If this distribution is not a product, the two systems are correlated. If it is a product, they are uncorrelated; measuring the properties of one system does not bring any information on the other. This is in particular the case if the state of each of the two systems is perfectly defined (which also defines the state of the whole system perfectly well). The notion of correlation between sub-systems therefore stems from the multiplicity of possible states of the whole system; fluctuations of this state are necessary to give its full meaning to the classical notion of correlation. In quantum mechanics, the situation is different: as we have seen (in particular in Chapter 4), even a physical system that is perfectly defined by a given state vector already contains fluctuations.
Characterizing and quantifying quantum correlations in states of many-particle systems is at the core of a full understanding of phase transitions in matter. In this work, we continue our investigation of the notion of generalized entanglement [Barnum et al., Phys. Rev. A 68, 032308 (2003)] by focusing on a simple Lie-algebraic measure of purity of a quantum state relative to an observable set. For the algebra of local observables on multi-qubit systems, the resulting local purity measure is equivalent to a recently introduced global entanglement measure [Meyer and Wallach, J. Math. Phys. 43, 4273 (2002)]. In the condensed-matter setting, the notion of Lie-algebraic purity is exploited to identify and characterize the quantum phase transitions present in two exactly solvable models, namely the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model and the spin-21 anisotropic XY model in a transverse magnetic field. For the latter, we argue that a natural fermionic observable set arising after the Jordan-Wigner transformation better characterizes the transition than alternative measures based on qubits. This illustrates the usefulness of going beyond the standard subsystem-based framework while providing a global disorder parameter for this model. Our results show how generalized entanglement leads to useful tools for distinguishing between the ordered and disordered phases in the case of broken symmetry quantum phase transitions. Additional implications and possible extensions of concepts to other systems of interest in condensed-matter physics are also discussed.