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arXiv:quant-ph/0703097 · Physical Review A

Separability in terms of a single entanglement witness

Piotr Badziąg, Paweł Horodecki, Ryszard Horodecki, Remigiusz Augusiak

Published Jul 3, 2013• 12 citations
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Abstract

The separability problem is formulated in terms of a characterization of a single entanglement witness. More specifically, we show that any (in general multipartite) state $\ensuremath{\varrho}$ is separable if and only if a specially constructed entanglement witness ${W}_{\ensuremath{\varrho}}$ is weakly optimal, i.e., its expectation value vanishes on at least one product vector. Interestingly, the witness can always be chosen to be decomposable. Our result changes the conceptual aspect of the separability problem and raises some questions about the properties of positive maps.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.88.010301

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The separability problem is formulated in terms of a characterization of a single entanglement witness. More specifically, we show that any (in general multipartite) state \ensuremathϱ\ensuremath{\varrho}\ensuremathϱ is separable if and only if a specially constructed entanglement witness W\ensuremathϱ{W}_{\ensuremath{\varrho}}W\ensuremathϱ​ is weakly optimal, i.e., its expectation value vanishes on at least one product vector. Interestingly, the witness can always be chosen to be decomposable. Our result changes the conceptual aspect of the separability problem and raises some questions about the properties of positive maps.
We present an analysis of the properties and characteristics of weakly optimal entanglement witnesses, that is witnesses whose expectation value vanishes on at least one product vector. Any weakly optimal entanglement witness can be written as the form of Wwopt=σ−cσmaxIW^{wopt}=\sigma-c_{\sigma}^{max} IWwopt=σ−cσmax​I, where cσmaxc_{\sigma}^{max}cσmax​ is a non-negative number and III is the identity matrix. We show the relation between the weakly optimal witness WwoptW^{wopt}Wwopt and the eigenvalues of the separable states σ\sigmaσ. Further we give an application of weakly optimal witnesses for constructing entanglement witnesses in a larger Hilbert space by extending the result of [P. Badzi\c{a}g {\it et al}, Phys. Rev. A {\bf 88}, 010301(R) (2013)], and we examine their geometric properties.
In this paper, we present a characterization of optimal entanglement witnesses in terms of positive maps and then provide a general method of checking optimality of entanglement witnesses. Applying it, we obtain indecomposable optimal witnesses that have no spanning property. These also provide examples that support a recent conjecture saying that the so-called structural physical approximations to optimal positive maps (optimal entanglement witnesses) give entanglement breaking maps (separable states).
We focus on determining the separability of an unknown bipartite quantum state $\ensuremath{\rho}$ by invoking a sufficiently large subset of all possible entanglement witnesses given the expected value of each element of a set of mutually orthogonal observables. We review the concept of an entanglement witness from the geometrical point of view and use this geometry to show that the set of separable states is not a polytope and to characterize the class of entanglement witnesses (observables) that detect entangled states on opposite sides of the set of separable states. All this serves to motivate a classical algorithm which, given the expected values of a subset of an orthogonal basis of observables of an otherwise unknown quantum state, searches for an entanglement witness in the span of the subset of observables. The idea of such an algorithm, which is an efficient reduction of the quantum separability problem to a global optimization problem, was introduced by [Ioannou et al., Phys. Rev. A 70, 060303(R)], where it was shown to be an improvement on the naive approach for the quantum separability problem (exhaustive search for a decomposition of the given state into a convex combination of separable states). The last section of the paper discusses in more generality such algorithms, which, in our case, assume a subroutine that computes the global maximum of a real function of several variables. Despite this, we anticipate that such algorithms will perform sufficiently well on small instances that they will render a feasible test for separability in some cases of interest (e.g., in $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}3$ dimensional systems).
One of the unsolved problems in the characterization of the optimal entanglement witnesses is the existence of optimal witnesses acting on bipartite Hilbert spaces ${\mathcal{H}}_{m,n}={\mathbb{C}}^{m}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{\mathbb{C}}^{n}$ such that the product vectors obeying $\ensuremath{\langle}e,f|W|e,f\ensuremath{\rangle}=0$ do not span Hm,n{\mathcal{H}}_{m,n}Hm,n​. So far, the only known examples of such witnesses were found among indecomposable witnesses, one of them being the witness corresponding to the Choi map. However, it remains an open question whether decomposable witnesses exist without the property of spanning. Here we answer this question affirmatively, providing systematic examples of such witnesses. Then, we generalize some of the recently obtained results on the characterization of $2\ensuremath{\bigotimes}n$ optimal decomposable witnesses [R. Augusiak et al., J. Phys. A 44, 212001 (2011)] to finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces Hm,n{\mathcal{H}}_{m,n}Hm,n​ with $m,n\ensuremath{\ge}3$.
An entanglement witness (EW) is an operator that allows the detection of entangled states. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for such operators to be optimal, i.e., to detect entangled states in an optimal way. We show how to optimize general EW, and then we particularize our results to the nondecomposable ones; the latter are those that can detect positive partial transpose entangled states (PPTES's). We also present a method to systematically construct and optimize this last class of operators based on the existence of ``edge'' PPTES's, i.e., states that violate the range separability criterion [Phys. Lett. A 232, 333 (1997)] in an extreme manner. This method also permits a systematic construction of nondecomposable positive maps (PM's). Our results lead to a sufficient condition for entanglement in terms of nondecomposable EW's and PM's. Finally, we illustrate our results by constructing optimal EW acting on $H={C}^{2}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{C}^{4}.$ The corresponding PM's constitute examples of PM's with minimal ``qubit'' domains, or---equivalently---minimal Hermitian conjugate codomains.
Abstract We consider multipartite quantum state discrimination and show that the minimum-error discrimination by separable measurements is closely related to the concept of entanglement witness (EW). Based on the properties of EW, we establish some necessary and/or sufficient conditions on minimum-error discrimination by separable measurements. We also provide some conditions on the upper bound of the maximum success probability over all possible separable measurements. Our results are illustrated by examples of multidimensional multipartite quantum states. Finally, we provide a systematic way in terms of the EW to construct multipartite quantum state ensembles showing nonlocality in state discrimination.