A complete hierarchy for the pure state marginal problem in quantum mechanics

Clarifying the relation between the whole and its parts is crucial for many problems in science. In quantum mechanics, this question manifests itself in the quantum marginal problem, which asks whether there is a global pure quantum state for some given marginals. This problem arises in many contexts, ranging from quantum chemistry to entanglement theory and quantum error correcting codes. In this paper, we prove a correspondence of the marginal problem to the separability problem. Based on this, we describe a sequence of semidefinite programs which can decide whether some given marginals are compatible with some pure global quantum state. As an application, we prove that the existence of multiparticle absolutely maximally entangled states for a given dimension is equivalent to the separability of an explicitly given two-party quantum state. Finally, we show that the existence of quantum codes with given parameters can also be interpreted as a marginal problem, hence, our complete hierarchy can also be used.

A novel entanglement criterion of two-qubit system

The “separability problem” in quantum information theory is a quite important and well-known hard problem. The low-dimensional system satisfies the PPT criterion. However, the high-dimensional system problem has been shown to be NP-hard problem. In general, it is very difficult to find the analytic solution of the density matrix for the high-dimensional system. Therefore, getting an analytic solution for two-qubit system is an interesting and useful problem. We propose a novel criterion for separability and entanglement-verification of two-qubit system. We expressed the density matrix by a sum of a principal density matrix and six separable density matrices. The necessary and sufficient conditions for the two-qubit system include that if the four involved coefficients [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and the principal density matrix [Formula: see text] are separable, then the two-qubit system is separable, otherwise the two-qubit system is entangled. Finally, our criterion results in a totally different conclusion compared to Horodecki’s criterion. We believe that the new criterion is more stringent than existing PPT methods.

Separability of diagonal symmetric states: a quadratic conic optimization problem

We study the separability problem in mixtures of Dicke states i.e., the separability of the so-called Diagonal Symmetric (DS) states. First, we show that separability in the case of DS inCd⊗Cd(symmetric qudits) can be reformulated as a quadratic conic optimization problem. This connection allows us to exchange concepts and ideas between quantum information and this field of mathematics. For instance, copositive matrices can be understood as indecomposable entanglement witnesses for DS states. As a consequence, we show that positivity of the partial transposition (PPT) is sufficient and necessary for separability of DS states ford≤4. Furthermore, ford≥5, we provide analytic examples of PPT-entangled states. Second, we develop new sufficient separability conditions beyond the PPT criterion for bipartite DS states. Finally, we focus onN-partite DS qubits, where PPT is known to be necessary and sufficient for separability. In this case, we present a family of almost DS states that are PPT with respect to each partition but nevertheless entangled.

Boundary of the set of separable states

Motivated by the separability problem in quantum systems 2⊗4, 3⊗3 and 2⊗2⊗2, we study the maximal (proper) faces of the convex body, S 1 , of normalized separable states in an arbitrary quantum system with finite-dimensional Hilbert space H = H 1 ⊗ H 2 ⊗ ⋯ ⊗ H n . To any subspace V ⊆ H , we associate a face F V of S 1 consisting of all states ρ ∈ S 1 whose range is contained in V . We prove that F V is a maximal face if and only if V is a hyperplane. If V =| ψ 〉 ⊥ , where | ψ 〉 is a product vector, we prove that Dim F V = d 2 − 1 − ∏ ( 2 d i − 1 ) , where d i = Dim H i and d = ∏ d i . We classify the maximal faces of S 1 in the cases 2⊗2 and 2⊗3. In particular, we show that the minimum and the maximum dimension of maximal faces is 6 and 8 for 2⊗2, and 20 and 24 for 2⊗3. The boundary, ∂ S 1 , of S 1 is the union of all maximal faces. When d >6, it is easy to show that there exist full states on ∂ S 1 , i.e. states ρ ∈ ∂ S 1 such that all partial transposes of ρ (including ρ itself) have rank d . Ha and Kye have recently constructed explicit such states in 2⊗4 and 3⊗3. In the latter case, they have also constructed a remarkable family of faces, depending on a real parameter b >0, b ≠1. Each face in the family is a nine-dimensional simplex, and any interior point of the face is a full state. We construct suitable optimal entanglement witnesses for these faces and analyse the three limiting cases b = 0 , 1 , ∞ .

Is absolute separability determined by the partial transpose?

The absolute separability problem asks for a characterization of the quantum states $\rho \in M_m\otimes M_n$ with the property that $U\rho U^\dagger$ is separable for all unitary matrices $U$. We investigate whether or not it is the case that $\rho$ is absolutely separable if and only if $U\rho U^\dagger$ has positive partial transpose for all unitary matrices $U$. In particular, we develop an easy-to-use method for showing that an entanglement witness or positive map is unable to detect entanglement in any such state, and we apply our method to many well-known separability criteria, including the range criterion, the realignment criterion, the Choi map and its generalizations, and the Breuer--Hall map. We also show that these two properties coincide for the family of isotropic states, and several eigenvalue results for entanglement witnesses are proved along the way that are of independent interest.