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arXiv:quant-ph/0510077 · New Journal of Physics

Optimal entanglement witnesses for continuous-variable systems

P. Hyllus, Jens Eisert

Published Apr 10, 2006• 155 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

This paper is concerned with all tests for continuous-variable entanglement that arise from linear combinations of second moments or variances of canonical coordinates, as they are commonly used in experiments to detect entanglement. All such tests for bi-partite and multi-partite entanglement correspond to hyperplanes in the set of second moments. It is shown that all optimal tests, those that are most robust against imperfections with respect to some figure of merit for a given state, can be constructed from solutions to semi-definite optimization problems. Moreover, we show that for each such test, referred to as an entanglement witness based on second moments, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the witness and a stronger product criterion, which amounts to a nonlinear witness, based on the same measurements. This generalizes the known product criteria. The presented tests are all applicable also to non-Gaussian states. To provide a service to the community, we present the documentation of two numerical routines, FullyWit and MultiWit , which have been made publicly available.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/8/4/051

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This paper is concerned with all tests for continuous-variable entanglement that arise from linear combinations of second moments or variances of canonical coordinates, as they are commonly used in experiments to detect entanglement. All such tests for bi-partite and multi-partite entanglement correspond to hyperplanes in the set of second moments. It is shown that all optimal tests, those that are most robust against imperfections with respect to some figure of merit for a given state, can be constructed from solutions to semi-definite optimization problems. Moreover, we show that for each such test, referred to as an entanglement witness based on second moments, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the witness and a stronger product criterion, which amounts to a nonlinear witness, based on the same measurements. This generalizes the known product criteria. The presented tests are all applicable also to non-Gaussian states. To provide a service to the community, we present the documentation of two numerical routines, FullyWit and MultiWit , which have been made publicly available.
Entanglement detection and estimation are fundamental problems in quantum information science. Compared with discrete-variable states, for which lots of efficient entanglement detection criteria and lower bounds of entanglement measures have been proposed, the continuous-variable entanglement is much less understood. Here we shall present a family of entanglement witnesses based on continuous-variable local orthogonal observables (CVLOOs) to detect and estimate entanglement of Gaussian and non-Gaussian states, especially for bound entangled states. By choosing an optimal set of CVLOOs, our entanglement witness is equivalent to the realignment criterion and can be used to detect bound entanglement of a class of 2+2 mode Gaussian states. Via our entanglement witness, lower bounds of two typical entanglement measures for arbitrary two-mode continuous-variable states are provided.
Abstract We develop a scheme for the detection of entanglement in any continuous variable system, by constructing an optimal entanglement witness from random homodyne measurements. To this end, we introduce a set of linear constraints that guarantee the necessary properties of a witness and allow for its optimisation via a semidefinite program. We test our method on the class of squeezed vacuum states and study the efficiency of entanglement detection in general unknown covariance matrices. The results show that we can detect entanglement, including bound entanglement, in arbitrary continuous variable states with fewer measurements than in full tomography. The statistical analysis of our method shows a good robustness to statistical errors in experiments.
Continuous-variable Gaussian entanglement is an attractive notion, both as a fundamental concept in quantum information theory, based on the well-established Gaussian formalism for phase-space variables, and as a practical resource in quantum technology, exploiting in particular, unconditional room-temperature squeezed-light quantum optics. The readily available high level of scalability, however, is accompanied by an increased theoretical complexity when the multipartite entanglement of a growing number of optical modes is considered. For such systems, we present several approaches to reconstruct the most probable physical covariance matrix from a measured nonphysical one and then test the reconstructed matrix for different kinds of separability (factorizability, concrete partite separability, or biseparability) even in the presence of measurement errors. All these approaches are based on formulating the desired properties (physicality or separability) as convex optimization problems, which can be efficiently solved with modern optimization solvers, even when the system grows. To every optimization problem, we construct the corresponding dual problem used to verify the optimality of the solution. Besides this numerical part of work, we derive an explicit analytical expression for the symplectic trace of a positive definite matrix, which can serve as a simple witness of an entanglement witness, and extend it for positive semidefinite matrices. In addition, we show that in some cases our optimization problems can be solved analytically. As an application of our analytical approach, we consider small instances of bound entangled or genuine multipartite entangled Gaussian states, including some examples from the literature that were treated only numerically, and a family of non-Gaussian states.
This thesis deals with methods of the detection of entanglement.After recalling some facts and definitions concerning entanglement and separability, we investigate two methods of the detection of entanglement.In the first part of this thesis we consider so-called entanglement witnesses, mainly in view of the detection of multipartite entanglement.Entanglement witnesses are observables for which a negative expectation value indicates entanglement.We first present a simple method to construct these witnesses.Since witnesses are nonlocal observables, they are not easy to measure in a real experiment.However, as we will show, one can circumvent this problem by decomposing the witness into several local observables which can be measured separately.We calculate the local decompositions for several interesting witnesses for two, three and four qubits.Local decompositions can be optimized in the number of measurement settings which are needed for an experimental implementation.We present a method to prove that a given local decomposition is optimal and discuss with this the optimality of our decompositions.Then we present another method of designing witnesses which are by construction measurable with local measurements.Finally, we shortly report on experiments where some of the witnesses derived in this part have been used to detect three-and four-partite entanglement of polarized photons.The second part of this thesis deals with separability criteria which are written in terms of uncertainty relations.There are two different formulations of uncertainty relations since one can measure the uncertainty of an observable by its variance as well as by entropic quantities.We show that both formulations are useful tools for the derivation of separability criteria for finite-dimensional systems and investigate the resulting criteria.Our results in this part exhibit also some more fundamental properties of entanglement: We show how known separability criteria for infinitedimensional systems can be translated to finite-dimensional systems.Furthermore, we prove that any entropic uncertainty relation on one part of the system gives rise to a separability criterion on the composite system.
The entanglement of Gaussian continuous-variable (CV) states is fully determined by the state's second moments. In contrast, some entangled non-Gaussian states evade every second-moment criterion, and non-Gaussian entanglement detection remains an experimental challenge. The p3p_3p3​-PPT criterion detects entanglement using moments of the partial transpose of the density matrix. This criterion was recently extended to CV systems using photon-number-resolving detectors and multi-copy interferometry; here we introduce a single-copy homodyne protocol that detects bipartite CV entanglement via the same criterion. Unbiased U-statistic estimators for the partial-transpose moments p2p_2p2​ and p3p_3p3​ are constructed directly from randomized homodyne data and used to evaluate the p3p_3p3​-PPT entanglement witnesses: a linear one for detection, and a quadratic one whose violation yields a dimension-free lower bound on the entanglement negativity. The protocol estimates p2p_2p2​ and p3p_3p3​ up to additive error ε\varepsilonε at Fock cutoff NNN from O((N+1)14/3/ε2)O((N+1)^{14/3}/\varepsilon^2)O((N+1)14/3/ε2) measurements at fixed confidence. We demonstrate the protocol on six families of Gaussian and non-Gaussian states, reaching 95%95\%95% empirical one-sided detection probability from ∼103\sim 10^3∼103 to 10410^4104 homodyne measurements for states with nˉ≈2\bar{n} \approx 2nˉ≈2, placing non-Gaussian entanglement detection within reach of current homodyne experiments.