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arXiv:quant-ph/0604109 · Physical Review A

Universal observable detecting all two-qubit entanglement and determinant-based separability tests

Remigiusz Augusiak, Maciej Demianowicz, Paweł Horodecki

Published Mar 13, 2008• 88 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We construct a single observable, measurement of whose mean value on four copies of an unknown two-qubit state is sufficient to determine unambiguously whether the state is separable or entangled. In other words, there exists a universal collective entanglement witness detecting all two-qubit entanglement. The test is directly linked to a function that characterizes the entanglement quantitatively to some extent. This function is an entanglement monotone under so-called local pure operations and classical communication which preserve local dimensions. Moreover, it provides tight upper and lower bounds for negativity and concurrence. An elementary quantum computing device estimating unknown two-qubit entanglement is designed.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.77.030301

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We construct a single observable, measurement of whose mean value on four copies of an unknown two-qubit state is sufficient to determine unambiguously whether the state is separable or entangled. In other words, there exists a universal collective entanglement witness detecting all two-qubit entanglement. The test is directly linked to a function that characterizes the entanglement quantitatively to some extent. This function is an entanglement monotone under so-called local pure operations and classical communication which preserve local dimensions. Moreover, it provides tight upper and lower bounds for negativity and concurrence. An elementary quantum computing device estimating unknown two-qubit entanglement is designed.
Detecting and quantifying quantum entanglement of a given unknown state poses problems that are fundamentally important for quantum information processing. Surprisingly, no direct (i.e., without quantum tomography) universal experimental implementation of a necessary and sufficient test of entanglement has been designed even for a general two-qubit state. Here we propose an experimental method for detecting a collective universal witness, which is a necessary and sufficient test of two-photon polarization entanglement. It allows us to detect entanglement for any two-qubit mixed state and to establish tight upper and lower bounds on its amount. A different element of this method is the sequential character of its main components, which allows us to obtain relatively complicated information about quantum correlations with the help of simple linear-optical elements. As such, this proposal realizes a universal two-qubit entanglement test within the present state of the art of quantum optics. We show the optimality of our setup with respect to the minimal number of measured quantities.
Entanglement is the key resource in quantum information processing, and an entanglement witness (EW) is designed to detect whether a quantum system has any entanglement. However, prior knowledge of the target states should be known first to design a suitable EW, which weakens this method. Nevertheless, a recent theory shows that it is possible to design a universal entanglement witness (UEW) to detect negative-partial-transpose (NPT) entanglement in unknown bipartite states with measurement-device-independent (MDI) characteristic. The outcome of a UEW can also be upgraded to be an entanglement measure. In this study, we experimentally design and realize an MDI UEW for two-qubit entangled states. All of the tested states are well-detected without any prior knowledge. We also show that it is able to quantify entanglement by comparing it with concurrence estimated through state tomography. The relation between them is also revealed. The entire experimental framework ensures that the UEW is MDI.
Detecting and quantifying quantum entanglement of a given unknown state poses problems that are fundamentally important for quantum information processing. Surprisingly, no direct (i.e., without quantum tomography) universal experimental implementation of a necessary and sufficient test of entanglement has been designed even for a general two-qubit state. Here we propose an experimental method for detecting a collective universal witness, which is a necessary and sufficient test of two-photon polarization entanglement. It allows us to detect entanglement for any two-qubit mixed state, and to establish tight upper and lower bounds on its amount. A novel element of this method is the sequential character of its main components, which allows us to obtain relatively complicated information about quantum correlations with the help of simple linear-optical elements. As such, this proposal is the first to realize a universal two-qubit entanglement test within the present state of the art of quantum optics. We show the optimality of our setup with respect to the minimal number of measured quantities.
Like entanglement, quantum discord quantifies the quantum correlations. Unlike entanglement, whose detection is extremely difficult, the quantum discord of an arbitrary bipartite state allows itself to be detected perfectly by a single observable, the quantum discord witness. In particular, we report a single observable whose expectation value provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the vanishing quantum discord of an arbitrary bipartite unknown state with four copies. A quantum circuit is designed to measure the quantum discord witness by using only local qubit-measurements.
We revisit the problem of detection of entanglement of an unknown two-qubit state using minimal resources. Using weak values and just two copies of an arbitrary two-qubit state, we present a protocol where a postselection measurement in the computational basis provides enough information to identify if the state is entangled or not. Our protocol enables complete state identification with a single-setting postselection measurement on two copies of the state. It follows that by restricting to pure states, the global interaction required for determining the weak values can be realized by local operations. We further show that our protocol is robust against errors arising from inappropriate global interactions applied during weak value determination.
Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.