Entanglement and the shareability of quantum states

Abstract

This brief review discusses the problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable or entangled. I describe an established approach to this problem that is based on the monogamy of entanglement, which is the observation that a pair of quantum systems that are strongly entangled must be uncorrelated with the rest of the world. Unentangled states on the other hand involve correlations that can be shared with many other parties. Checking whether a given quantum state is shareable involves constructing certain symmetric quantum state extensions and I discuss how to do this using a class of optimizations known as semidefinite programs. An attractive feature of this approach is that it generates explicit entanglement witnesses that can be measured to demonstrate the entanglement experimentally. In recent years analysis of this approach has greatly increased our understanding of the complexity of determining whether a given quantum state is entangled and this review aims to give a unified discussion of these developments. Specifically, I describe how to use finite quantum de Finetti theorems to prove that highly shareable states are nearly separable and use these results to understand the computational complexity of the problem.This article is part of a special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical devoted to ‘50 years of Bell’s theorem’.