We present a survey on mathematical topics relating to separable states and entanglement witnesses. The convex cone duality between separable states and entanglement witnesses is discussed and later generalized to other families of operators, leading to their characterization via multiplicative properties. The condition for an operator to be an entanglement witness is rephrased as a problem of positivity of a family of real polynomials. By solving the latter in a specific case of a three-parameter family of operators, we obtain explicit description of entanglement witnesses belonging to that family. A related problem of block positivity over real numbers is discussed. We also consider a broad family of block positivity tests and prove that they can never be sufficient, which should be useful in case of future efforts in that direction. Finally, we introduce the concept of length of a separable state and present new results concerning relationships between the length and Schmidt rank. In particular, we prove that separable states of length lower or equal to 3 have Schmidt ranks equal to their lengths. We also give an example of a state which has length 4 and Schmidt rank 3.
Characterizing volume via cone duality