Entanglement on mixed stabilizer states: normal forms and reduction procedures

Abstract

The stabilizer formalism allows the efficient description of a sizeable class of pure as well as mixed quantum states of n-qubit systems. That same formalism has important applications in the field of quantum error correcting codes, where mixed stabilizer states correspond to projectors on subspaces associated with stabilizer codes. In this paper, we derive efficient reduction procedures to obtain various useful normal forms for stabilizer states. We explicitly prove that these procedures will always converge to the correct result and that these procedures are efficient in that they only require a polynomial number of operations on the generators of the stabilizers. On one hand, we obtain two single-party normal forms. The first, the row-reduced echelon form, is obtained using only permutations and multiplications of generators. This form is useful to calculate partial traces of stabilizer states. The second is the fully reduced form, where the reduction procedure invokes single-qubit operations and CNOT operations as well. This normal form allows for the efficient calculation of the overlap between two stabilizer states, as well as of the Uhlmann fidelity between them, and their Bures distance. On the other hand, we also find a reduction procedure of bipartite stabilizer states, where the operations involved are restricted to be local ones. The two-party normal form thus obtained lays bare a very simple bipartite entanglement structure of stabilizer states. To wit, we prove that every bipartite mixed stabilizer state is locally equivalent to a direct product of a number of maximally entangled states and, potentially, a separable state. As a consequence, using this normal form we can efficiently calculate every reasonable bipartite entanglement measure of mixed stabilizer states.