Entanglement witnesses of four-qubit tripartite separable quantum states

A quantum entangled state is easily disturbed by noise and degenerates into a separable state. Comparing to the entanglement of bipartite quantum systems, less progresses have been made for the entanglement of multipartite quantum systems. For tripartite separability of a four-qubit system, we propose two entanglement witnesses, each of which corresponds to a necessary condition of tripartite separability. For the four-qubit GHZ state mixed with a W state and white noise, it is proved that the necessary conditions of tripartite separability are also sufficient at W state side.

Entanglement witnesses from mutually unbiased measurements

A new family of positive, trace-preserving maps is introduced. It is defined using the mutually unbiased measurements, which generalize the notion of mutual unbiasedness of orthonormal bases. This family allows one to define entanglement witnesses whose indecomposability depends on the characteristics of the associated measurement operators. We provide examples of indecomposable witnesses and compare their entanglement detection properties with the realignment criterion.

Entangled symmetric states and copositive matrices

Entanglement in symmetric quantum states and the theory of copositive matrices are intimately related concepts. For the simplest symmetric states, i.e., the diagonal symmetric (DS) states, it has been shown that there exists a correspondence between exceptional (non-exceptional) copositive matrices and non-decomposable (decomposable) Entanglement Witnesses (EWs). Here we show that EWs of symmetric, but not DS, states can also be constructed from extended copositive matrices, providing new examples of bound entangled symmetric states, together with their corresponding EWs, in arbitrary odd dimensions.

Free versus bound entanglement, a NP-hard problem tackled by machine learning

Entanglement detection in high dimensional systems is a NP-hard problem since it is lacking an efficient way. Given a bipartite quantum state of interest free entanglement can be detected efficiently by the PPT-criterion (Peres-Horodecki criterion), in contrast to detecting bound entanglement, i.e. a curious form of entanglement that can also not be distilled into maximally (free) entangled states. Only a few bound entangled states have been found, typically by constructing dedicated entanglement witnesses, so naturally the question arises how large is the volume of those states. We define a large family of magically symmetric states of bipartite qutrits for which we find $$82\%$$ 82 % to be free entangled, $$2\%$$ 2 % to be certainly separable and as much as $$10\%$$ 10 % to be bound entangled, which shows that this kind of entanglement is not rare. Via various machine learning algorithms we can confirm that the remaining $$6\%$$ 6 % of states are more likely to belonging to the set of separable states than bound entangled states. Most important we find via dimension reduction algorithms that there is a strong two-dimensional (linear) sub-structure in the set of bound entangled states. This revealed structure opens a novel path to find and characterize bound entanglement towards solving the long-standing problem of what the existence of bound entanglement is implying.

Witnessing quantum memory in non-Markovian processes

We present a method to detect quantum memory in a non-Markovian process. We call a process Markovian when the environment does not provide a memory that retains correlations across different system-environment interactions. We define two types of non-Markovian processes, depending on the required memory being classical or quantum. We formalise this distinction using the process matrix formalism, through which a process is represented as a multipartite state. Within this formalism, a test for entanglement in a state can be mapped to a test for quantum memory in the corresponding process. This allows us to apply separability criteria and entanglement witnesses to the detection of quantum memory. We demonstrate the method in a simple model where both system and environment are single interacting qubits and map the parameters that lead to quantum memory. As with entanglement witnesses, our method of witnessing quantum memory provides a versatile experimental tool for open quantum systems.