Detecting Gaussian entanglement via local quantities

Abstract

Entanglement detection and quantification usually require the knowledge of correlations and thus is a global issue. For both theoretical and practical reasons, it is desirable to characterize entanglement via local quantities. Of course, this can only be achieved in special setups with some underlying structure encoding the correlations. For the often encountered bilinear interactions such as beamsplitter experiments, we propose an operational and friendly entanglement criterion for the two-mode Gaussian output states. Specifically, we show that in order to detect and evaluate the entanglement of the output states of a bilinear interaction involving uncorrelated Gaussian input states, we do not need to know the joint covariance matrix of the whole two-mode output states. Instead, we only need the respective covariances of the reduced states of the two input modes and that of the two output modes, which are all local quantities pertaining to a single mode and can be easily measured locally without explicitly considering the correlations between the modes. This is achieved by exploiting the input-output characteristics of bilinear interactions. The result recasts the celebrated entanglement criteria of Simon (Phys. Rev. Lett., 84 (2000) 2726) and Duan et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., 84 (2000) 2722) into a more convenient and simple form.