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arXiv:quant-ph/0510035 · Quantum Information and Computation

The distillability problem revisited

Lieven Clarisse

Published Sep 1, 2006• 18 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

An important open problem in quantum information theory is the question of the existence of NPT bound entanglement. In the past years, little progress has been made, mainly because of the lack of mathematical tools to address the problem. (i) In an attempt to overcome this, we show how the distillability problem can be reformulated as a special instance of the separability problem, for which a large number of tools and techniques are available. (ii) Building up to this we also show how the problem can be formulated as a Schmidt number problem. (iii) A numerical method for detecting distillability is presented and strong evidence is given that all 1-copy undistillable Werner states are also 4-copy undistillable. (iv) The same method is used to estimate the volume of distillable states, and the results suggest that bound entanglement is primarily a phenomenon found in low dimensional quantum systems. (v) Finally, a set of one parameter states is presented which we conjecture to exhibit all forms of distillability.

DOI
10.26421/qic6.6-6

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•May 9, 2008•12 citations
An important open problem in quantum information theory is the question of the existence of NPT bound entanglement. In the past years, little progress has been made, mainly because of the lack of mathematical tools to address the problem. (i) In an attempt to overcome this, we show how the distillability problem can be reformulated as a special instance of the separability problem, for which a large number of tools and techniques are available. (ii) Building up to this we also show how the problem can be formulated as a Schmidt number problem. (iii) A numerical method for detecting distillability is presented and strong evidence is given that all 1-copy undistillable Werner states are also 4-copy undistillable. (iv) The same method is used to estimate the volume of distillable states, and the results suggest that bound entanglement is primarily a phenomenon found in low dimensional quantum systems. (v) Finally, a set of one parameter states is presented which we conjecture to exhibit all forms of distillability.
The pure entangled state is of vital importance in the field of quantum information. The process of asymptotically extracting pure entangled states from many copies of mixed states via local operations and classical communication is called entanglement distillation. The entanglement distillability problem, which is a long-standing open problem, asks whether such process exists. The 2-copy undistillability of 4×44\times44×4 undistillable Werner states has been reduced to the validness of the a matrix inequality, that is, the sum of the squares of the largest two singular values of matrix A⊗I+I⊗BA\otimes I + I \otimes BA⊗I+I⊗B does not exceed (3d−4)/d2(3d-4)/d^2(3d−4)/d2 with A,BA,BA,B traceless d×dd\times dd×d matrices and ∣∣A∣∣F2+∣∣B∣∣F2=1/d||A||_F^2+||B||_F^2=1/d∣∣A∣∣F2​+∣∣B∣∣F2​=1/d when d=4d=4d=4. The latest progress, made by Ł.~Pankowski~ et al~[IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 56, 4085 (2010)], shows that this conjecture holds when both matrices AAA and BBB are normal. In this paper, we prove that the conjecture holds when one of matrices AAA and BBB is normal and the other one is arbitrary. Our work makes solid progress towards this conjecture and thus the distillability problem.
Entanglement distillation is a fundamental task in quantum information theory. In this work, we prove that Werner states in arbitrary dimension are 222-copy distillable if and only if they are 111-copy distillable. This answers the longstanding open question of the 222-copy distillability of Werner states. This is an important step on determining whether every non-positive partial transpose (NPT) state is distillable, which remains one of the central open problems in the field of entanglement distillation.
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.
In this paper, existence of bound entangled states with nonpositive partial transpose (NPT) is considered. As one knows, existence of such states would in particular imply nonadditivity of distillable entanglement. Moreover, it would rule out a simple mathematical description of the set of distillable states. The particular state, known to be 1-copy nondistillable and supposed to be bound entangled, is considered. The problem of its two-copy distillability, which boils down to show that maximal overlap of some projectorQwith Schmidt rank two states does not exceed 1/2 (called thehalf-property), is studied. First, it is shown that the maximum overlap can be attained on vectors that are not of the simple product form with respect to cut between two copies. Then, the problem in attacked twofold way: (a) the half-property is proved for some wide classes of Schmidt rank two states; (b) the overlap forallSchmidt rank two states is bounded from above bycA⊗I+I⊗BwithA,Btraceless 4 × 4 matrices, and TrAfA+ TrBfB=1/4.
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 consider entanglement distillation under the assumption that the input states are allowed to be correlated among each other. We hence replace the usually considered independent and identically-distributed hypothesis by the weaker assumption of merely having identical reductions. We find that whether a state is then distillable or not is only a property of these reductions, and not of the correlations that are present in the input state. This is shown by establishing an appealing relation between the set of copy-correlated undistillable states and the standard set of undistillable states: The former turns out to be the convex hull of the latter. As an example of the usefulness of our approach to the study of entanglement distillation, we prove a new activation result, which generalizes earlier findings: it is shown that for every entangled state σ and every k, there exists a copy-correlated k-undistillable state ρ such that σ ⊗ ρ is single-copy distillable. Finally, the relation of our results to the conjecture about the existence of bound entangled states with a non-positive partial transpose is discussed. 1