There exist sets of multipartite orthogonal states which can not be distinguished by local operation and classical communication (LOCC). The simplest example is the set of four Bell states. The problem of characterizing a set in terms of distinguishability is a hard problem in general. For maximally entangled states, some results are known. Local cloning of entangled states by supplying necessary entanglement in the blank state is another idea that was introduced very recently. Interestingly there are sets of orthogonal entangled states which can be distinguished locally but can not be copied by local operation (even if necessary entanglement is supplied in the blank state) contrary to the fact that happens in the case of global operation.
We investigate the conditions under which a set
S of pure bipartite quantum states on a $D\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}D$ system can be locally cloned deterministically by separable operations, when at least one of the states is full Schmidt rank. We allow for the possibility of cloning using a resource state that is less than maximally entangled. Our results include that: (i) all states in
S must be full Schmidt rank and equally entangled under the
G-concurrence measure, and (ii) the set
S can be extended to a larger clonable set generated by a finite group
G of order
∣G∣=N, the number of states in the larger set. It is then shown that any local cloning apparatus is capable of cloning a number of states that divides
D exactly. We provide a complete solution for two central problems in local cloning, giving necessary and sufficient conditions for (i) when a set of maximally entangled states can be locally cloned, valid for all
D; and (ii) local cloning of entangled qubit states with nonvanishing entanglement. In both of these cases, we show that a maximally entangled resource is necessary and sufficient, and the states must be related to each other by local unitary ``shift'' operations. These shifts are determined by the group structure, so need not be simple cyclic permutations. Assuming this shifted form and partially entangled states, then in
D=3 we show that a maximally entangled resource is again necessary and sufficient, while for higher-dimensional systems, we find that the resource state must be strictly more entangled than the states in
S. All of our necessary conditions for separable operations are also necessary conditions for local operations and classical communication (LOCC), since the latter is a proper subset of the former. In fact, all our results hold for LOCC, as our sufficient conditions are demonstrated for LOCC, directly.
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.
We consider the relation between the orthogonality and the distinguishability of a set of arbitrary states (including multipartite states). It is shown that if a set of arbitrary states can be distinguished by local operations and classical communication (LOCC), each of the states can be written as a linear combination of product vectors such that all product vectors of one of the states are orthogonal to the other states. With this result we then prove a simple necessary condition for LOCC distinguishability of a class of orthogonal states. These conclusions may be useful in discussing the distinguishability of orthogonal quantum states further, understanding the essence of nonlocality and discussing the distillation of entanglement.
One of the many interesting features of quantum nonlocality is that the states of a multipartite quantum system cannot always be distinguished as well by local measurements as they can when all quantum measurements are allowed. In this work, we characterize the distinguishability of sets of multipartite quantum states when restricted to separable measurements, those which contain the class of local measurements but nevertheless are free of entanglement between the component systems. We consider two quantities: the separable fidelity, a truly quantum quantity, which measures how well we can ``clone'' the input state, and the classical probability of success, which simply gives the optimal probability of identifying the state correctly. We obtain lower and upper bounds on the separable fidelity and give several examples in the bipartite and multipartite settings where these bounds are optimal. Moreover the optimal values in these cases can be attained by local measurements. We further show that for distinguishing orthogonal states under separable measurements, a strategy that maximizes the probability of success is also optimal for separable fidelity. We point out that the equality of fidelity and success probability does not depend on an using the optimal strategy, only on the orthogonality of the states. To illustrate this, we present an example where two sets (one consisting of orthogonal states and the other nonorthogonal states) are shown to have the same separable fidelity even though the success probabilities are different.