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arXiv:quant-ph/0503221 · Physical Review A

Tensor products of convex sets and the volume of separable states on N qudits

Guillaume Aubrun, Stanisław J. Szarek

Published Feb 14, 2006• 74 citations
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Abstract

This paper deals with estimating the volume of the set of separable mixed quantum states when the dimension of the state space grows to infinity. This has been studied recently for qubits; here we consider larger particles and conclude that, in all cases, the proportion of the states that are separable is superexponentially small in the dimension of the set. We also show that the partial transpose criterion becomes imprecise when the dimension increases, and that the lower bound ${6}^{\ensuremath{-}N∕2}$ on the (Hilbert-Schmidt) inradius of the set of separable states on $N$ qubits obtained recently by Gurvits and Barnum is essentially optimal. We employ standard tools of classical convexity, high-dimensional probability, and geometry of Banach spaces. One relatively nonstandard point is a formal introduction of the concept of projective tensor products of convex bodies, and an initial study of this concept.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.73.022109

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In this paper we give sharp two-sided estimates of the volume of the set of separable states on NNN qubits. In particular, the magnitude of the ``effective radius'' of that set in the sense of volume is determined up to a factor which is a (small) power of NNN, and thus precisely on the scale of powers of its dimension. We also identify an ellipsoid that appears to optimally approximate the set of separable states. Additionally, one of the appendixes contains sharp estimates (by known methods) for the expected values of norms of the Gaussian unitary ensemble random matrices. We employ standard tools of classical convexity, high-dimensional probability, and geometry of Banach spaces.
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The optimal (pure state) ensemble length of a separable state, A, is the minimum number of (pure) product states needed in convex combination to construct A. We study the set of all separable states with optimal (pure state) ensemble length equal to k or fewer. Lower bounds on k are found below which these sets have measure 0 in the set of separable states. In the bipartite case and the multiparticle case where one of the particles has significantly more quantum numbers than the rest, the lower bounds are sharp. A consequence of our results is that for all two particle systems, except possibly those with a qubit and those with a nine dimensional Hilbert space, and for all systems with more than two particles the optimal pure state ensemble length for a randomly picked separable state is with probability 1 greater than the state’s rank. In bipartite systems with each particle having the same Hilbert space, with probablity 1 it is greater than 1/4 the rank raised to the 3/2 power and in a system with p qubits with probability 1 it is greater than 2 2p /(1 + 2p), which is almost the maximal rank squared. 1
We introduce a class of states of a composite quantum system, the so-called cross states, that turn out to play a major role in the theory of entanglement for a genuinely infinite-dimensional bipartite system. In the case where at least one of the Hilbert spaces of the bipartition is finite-dimensional, all states are cross states, whereas, in the genuinely infinite-dimensional setting where the dimension of both Hilbert spaces is not finite, the cross states form a trace-norm dense, convex, proper subset of the set of all states. In the latter case, the cross states can be regarded as those physical states that possess a finite amount of entanglement; accordingly, all separable states are of this kind. We prove that, for any Hilbert space dimension, the separable states can be characterized as those cross states that minimize a suitable norm, i.e., the projective norm associated with the projective tensor product of two trace classes; all other cross states are density operators belonging to the projective tensor product space. This is a generalization of the classical cross norm criterion of separability. Finally, we define an extended real-valued entanglement function and study its main properties. Coherently with the interpretation of cross states as finitely entangled states, this function is finite, and coincides with the projective norm, precisely on the cross states of the system.