Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering: Its geometric quantification and witness

Abstract

We propose a measure of quantum steerability, namely a convex steering monotone, based on the trace distance between a given assemblage and its corresponding closest assemblage admitting a local-hidden-state (LHS) model. We provide methods to estimate such a quantity, via lower and upper bounds, based on semidefinite programming. One of these upper bounds has a clear geometrical interpretation as a linear function of rescaled Euclidean distances in the Bloch sphere between the normalized quantum states of: (i) a given assemblage and (ii) an LHS assemblage. For a qubit-qubit quantum state, the above ideas also allow us to visualize various steerability properties of the state in the Bloch sphere via the so-called LHS surface. In particular, some steerability properties can be obtained by comparing such an LHS surface with a corresponding quantum steering ellipsoid. Thus, we propose a witness of steerability corresponding to the difference of the volumes enclosed by these two surfaces. This witness (which reveals the steerability of a quantum state) enables finding an optimal measurement basis, which can then be used to determine the proposed steering monotone (which describes the steerability of an assemblage) optimized over all mutually-unbiased bases.