Entanglement in Two and Three Quantum Mechanical Systems

Abstract

Entanglement is one of most peculiar characteristic of Quantum Mechanics (probably the other most mentioned is the particle tunneling through a barrier) because it entails correlations that supersedes classical correlations. It is conceived as the genuine quantum characteristic by many researchers and quite recently it has emerged as a physical resource to produce non-classical task, like quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography and quantum information. Entanglement could be distributed (efficient quantum communication is equivalent to efficient entanglement distribution (Plenio & Virmani, 2007)), concentrated (given an amount of entanglement, equal to the full content of entanglement in n pairs of identical entangled pure state systems, it is possible, using local operations on each system, to concentrate the total amount of entanglement into a smaller number m, m < n, of maximally pure entangled state system (Bennett, et al.; 1996)) and used to perform many quantum information tasks useful to overcome technical restrictions present on classical communication. In this chapter, we review the entanglement of quantum mechanical systems. First, in Section 2, we give a characterization of entanglement in terms of its special features as resource and its mathematical structure. Then, in section 3, we review some of the Bell inequalities. In Sections 4 and 5, we review some of the most important entanglement measures published for two and three entangled systems. After that, in Section 6, we give a characterization of quantum gates and operators by its entanglement power, i. e. the amount of entanglement that they can produce when acting on an arbitrary state. Finally, in Section 7, we briefly review the experimental detection of entanglement.