Four-qubit pure states as fermionic states

Abstract

The embedding of the $n$-qubit space into the $n$-fermion space with $2n$ modes is a widely used method in studying various aspects of these systems. This simple mapping raises a crucial question: Does the embedding preserve the entanglement structure? It is known that the answer is affirmative for $n=2$ and $n=3$. That is, under either local unitary (LU) operations or with respect to stochastic local operations and classical communication (SLOCC), there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two- (or three)-qubit orbits and the two- (or three)-fermion orbits with four (or six) modes. However, these results do not generalize as the mapping from the $n$-qubit orbits to the $n$-fermion orbits with $2n$ modes is no longer surjective for $n>3$. Here we consider the case of $n=4$. We show that, surprisingly, the mapping of orbits from qubits to fermions is injective under SLOCC, and a similar result holds under LU for generic orbits. As a by-product, we obtain a complete answer to the problem of SLOCC equivalence of pure four-qubit states.