An unextendible product basis (UPB) for a multipartite quantum system is an incomplete orthogonal product basis whose complementary subspace contains no product state. We give examples of UPBs, and show that the uniform mixed state over the subspace complementary to any UPB is a bound entangled state. We exhibit a tripartite $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}2$ UPB whose complementary mixed state has tripartite entanglement but no bipartite entanglement, i.e., all three corresponding $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4$ bipartite mixed states are unentangled. We show that members of a UPB are not perfectly distinguishable by local positive operator valued measurements and classical communication.
An unextendible product basis (UPB) for a multipartite quantum system is an incomplete orthogonal product basis whose complementary subspace contains no product state. We give examples of UPBs, and show that the uniform mixed state over the subspace complementary to any UPB is a bound entangled state. We exhibit a tripartite 2\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi2\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi2 UPB whose complementary mixed state has tripartite entanglement but no bipartite entanglement, i.e., all three corresponding 2\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi4 bipartite mixed states are unentangled. We show that members of a UPB are not perfectly distinguishable by local positive operator valued measurements and classical communication.
As we know, unextendible product basis (UPB) is an incomplete basis whose members cannot be perfectly distinguished by local operations and classical communication. However, very little is known about those incomplete and locally indistinguishable product bases that are not UPBs. In this paper, we first construct a series of orthogonal product bases that are completable but not locally distinguishable in a general m ⊗ n (m ≥ 3 and n ≥ 3) quantum system. In particular, we give so far the smallest number of locally indistinguishable states of a completable orthogonal product basis in arbitrary quantum systems. Furthermore, we construct a series of small and locally indistinguishable orthogonal product bases in m ⊗ n (m ≥ 3 and n ≥ 3). All the results lead to a better understanding of the structures of locally indistinguishable product bases in arbitrary bipartite quantum system.
The multiqubit bound entangled states that are uniformly mixed over the subspaces complementary to unextendible product bases (UPBs) are interesting members from the peculiar family of bound entangled states. Their entanglement is delocalized and they look separable with respect to any partition into a single party and all remaining parties. Only one example of quantifying the entanglement of this type of states in the case of three-qubit states has been studied [C. Branciard, H. Zhu, L. Chen, and V. Scarani, Evaluation of two different entanglement measures on a bound entangled state, Phys. Rev. A 82, 012327 (2010)]. We provide a systematic procedure for generating decompositions of such states in terms of minimally entangled states. This procedure enables us to measure entanglement in terms of the concurrence for a wide range of families of these bound entangled (BE) states with each family containing an infinite number of states. In particular, we study one family of three-qubit states in addition to six inequivalent families of four-qubit bound entangled states. These studied families are examples that represent all the known 1446 families of four-qubit UPB-based bound entangled states, which means that our method is applicable to all the 1446 families. In addition, a discussion on the matter of applicability of the proposed strategy to additional families is provided. Specifically, the proposed method looks promising for measuring entanglement of other families of UPB-based BE states in addition to some families of symmetric multipartite positive under partial transposition BE states.
While we possess a basic understanding of bipartite entangled systems, multipartite entanglement
remains mostly unexplored. Specifically, it is quite unclear how several concepts
developed for the bipartite case can be generalized in a meaningful way to study multipartite
scenarios. At the heart of this research on multiparty quantum states lies the problem
of testing the entanglement present in a given state. It has been proved, that in the most
general scenario, the question of determining the entanglement or separability of a state is
NP-hard.
From this perspective, it is desirable to have a construction of states for which
some prior knowledge about entanglement properties already exist. One particular approach
to this problem relies on the construction of Completely Entangled Subspaces
(CESes), i.e., subspaces void of product states. It follows that states in such subspaces
are necessarily entangled and form a convex set. This means we possess prior knowledge
of entanglement of all states in that subspace. In our study of multiparty systems, we have
constructed a specific subclass of the CESes such that all the states residing in the newly
constructed subspace is not only entangled but also Genuinely Entangled. A given state
is Genuinely Entangled if it is not just entangled for any pair among the multiparty but is
entangled with all the parties present and at the same time.
The notion of a CES is intimately connected with the idea of Unextendible Product
Bases (UPBs). UPBs are sets of twisted orthogonal product states/vectors spanning a
proper subset of a given Hilbert space. They have the property that no other product vector
exists in the ortho-complement of their span. While UPBs have been relatively well
studied for bipartite systems, no known multipartite orthogonal UPBs give rise to Genuinely
Entangled Subspace (GES). In our study, we provide schemes for the construction
of GES for a tripartite scenario. The construction proposed is linked to a Symmetric Block
structure such that it can be extended to any arbitrary dimension.One of the primary motivations for construction of UPBs is to create entangled
states which remain Positive under Partial Transposition (PPT). These classes of Entangled
States are known to be un-distillable and hence called Bound Entangled, i.e., states
in which the resource of Entanglement is not free to be used. These Bound Entangled states are essential to our understanding the basics of Entanglement Theory such as distillability,
quantification of entanglement, and the relationship between nonlocality and
entanglement (apart from their applications in other quantum information tasks). The
construction itself guarantees the PPTness of the state residing in the complementary subspace
i.e. formed by the equal mixture of the basis spanning the complementary space.
In our study, we propose a symmetric and an asymmetric construction of the Biseperable
and Genuinely Entangled states. Via the symmetric construction, we have derived two
subspaces, an eight-dimensional CES and a five-dimensional GES within the CES mentioned
above. The state formed by the equal mixtures of the CES is a Genuinely Bound
Entangled PPT state i.e., it entangled as well as PPT in each cut. To the best of author’s
knowledge, the proposed state is the only know Genuinely Entangled PPT state derived
from a UPB construction.
Additionally, the state lying in the ortho-complement of UPB (i.e., states formed
by an equal mixture of the basis of CES) is known to be a PPT Bound Entangled state.
However, unlike in case of UPBs, the state in the ortho-complement of Unextendible
Biseparable Product basis (i.e. states formed by an equal mixture of the basis of GES)
is found to be NPT states across all bipartitions. This is striking and prompts us to believe
that the state in the ortho-complement of CES is the only examples of bound entangled
state and distinct from other states in the space. We further expect that the state we obtain
must exhibit some distinctive features. We verify that this state is one copy undistillable.
However, the n-copy undistillablity needs to be probed further, and no conclusive
statement regarding the same can be made with our current analysis. The existence of
NPT-bound entangled state would prove that the distillable entanglement is nonadditive
and not convex.
The constructed subspace of Genuinely Entangled States in-turn reveals some
peculiar features. As mentioned above, unlike the Bennett et al., 1999 case, the state in the
ortho-complement is an NPT state across all bipartition. Furthermore, it was numerically
verified by taking one hundred thousand random probability distributions that the entire
five-dimensional genuine subspace obtained happens to be NPT. This leads us to conjecture
that the subspace obtained is a Genuinly Entangled NPT subspace. To the best of
the author’s knowledge, no known genuine NPT subspace exists for the multipartite scenario.
The exists only one other NPT subspace for Biseparable States and was suggested
by Johnston, 2013. Here, the construction is not related to UPBs. We further argue that
if our conjecture on the NPTness of the entire subspace is correct, any four-dimensional
subspace of the constructed tripartite NPT GES is also distillable. This would then be the
only known distillable subspace in a multipartite scenario. We believe that our study brings us closer to a systematic analysis of multipartite
entanglement and provides us with tools to probe further into the current mess of an
entangled (read communicating) world of multiple actors.
Unextendible product basis (UPB), a set of incomplete orthonormal product states whose complementary space has no product state, is very useful for constructing bound entangled states. Naturally, instead of considering the set of product states, Bravyi and Smolin considered the set of maximally entangled states. They introduced the concept of unextendible maximally entangled basis (UMEB), a set of incomplete orthonormal maximally entangled states whose complementary space contains no maximally entangled state [Phys. Rev. A 84, 042,306 (2011)]. An entangled state whose nonzero Schmidt coefficients are all equal to 1/k is called a special entangled state of “type k”. In this paper, we introduce a concept named special unextendible entangled basis of “type k” which generalizes both UPB and UMEB. A special unextendible entangled basis of “type k” (SUEBk) is a set of incomplete orthonormal special entangled states of “type k” whose complementary space has no special entangled state of “type k”. We present an efficient method to construct sets of SUEBk. The main strategy here is to decompose the whole space into two subspaces such that the rank of each element in one subspace can be easily upper bounded by k while the other one can be generated by two kinds of the special entangled states of “type k”. This method is very effective when k = pm ≥ 3 where p is a prime number. For these cases, we can obtain sets of SUEBk with continuous integer cardinality when the local dimensions are large.
Unextendible product bases (UPBs) play a key role in the study of quantum entanglement and nonlocality. Here we provide an equivalent characterization of UPBs in graph-theoretic terms. Different from previous graph-theoretic investigations of UPBs, which focused mostly on the orthogonality relations between different product states, our characterization includes a graph-theoretic reformulation of the unextendibility condition. Building on this characterization, we develop a constructive method for building UPBs in low dimensions and shed light on the open question of whether there exist genuinely unextendible product bases (GUPBs), that is, multipartite product bases that are unextendible with respect to every possible bipartition. We derive a lower bound on the size of any candidate GUPB, significantly improving over the state of the art. Moreover, we show that every minimal GUPB saturating our bound must be associated to regular graphs and discuss a possible path towards the construction of a minimal GUPB in a tripartite system of minimal local dimension. Finally, we apply our characterization to the problem of distinguishing UPB states under local operations and classical communication, deriving a necessary condition for reliable discrimination in the asymptotic limit.