Sensitivity versus selectivity in entanglement detection via collective witnesses

Nonlocal operation enhanced entanglement detection and classification

Entanglement detection and estimation are fundamental problems in quantum information science. Compared with discrete-variable states, for which lots of efficient entanglement detection criteria and lower bounds of entanglement measures have been proposed, the continuous-variable entanglement is much less understood. Here we shall present a family of entanglement witnesses based on continuous-variable local orthogonal observables (CVLOOs) to detect and estimate entanglement of Gaussian and non-Gaussian states, especially for bound entangled states. By choosing an optimal set of CVLOOs, our entanglement witness is equivalent to the realignment criterion and can be used to detect bound entanglement of a class of 2+2 mode Gaussian states. Via our entanglement witness, lower bounds of two typical entanglement measures for arbitrary two-mode continuous-variable states are provided.

Entanglement witnesses (EW) allow the detection of entanglement in a quantum system, from the measurement of some few observables. They do not require the complete determination of the quantum state, which is regarded as a main advantage. On this paper it is experimentally analyzed an entanglement witness recently proposed in the context of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance experiments to test it in some Bell-diagonal states. We also propose some optimal entanglement witness for Bell-diagonal states. The efficiency of the two types of EW’s are compared to a measure of entanglement with tomographic cost, the generalized robustness of entanglement. It is used a GRAPE algorithm to produce an entangled state which is out of the detection region of the EW for Bell-diagonal states. Upon relaxation, the results show that there is a region in which both EW fails, whereas the generalized robustness still shows entanglement, but with the entanglement witness proposed here with a better performance.

Entanglement is an essential resource in many quantum information tasks and\nentanglement witness is a widely used tool for its detection. In experiments\nthe prepared state generally deviates from the target state due to some noise.\nNormally the white noise model is applied to quantifying such derivation and in\nthe same time reveals the robustness of the witness. However, there may exist\nother kind of noise, in which the coherent noise can dramatically "rotate" the\nprepared state. In this way, the coherent noise is likely to lead to a failure\nof the detection, even though the underlying state is actually entangled. In\nthis work, we propose an efficient entanglement detection protocol for\n$N$-partite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ)-like states. The protocol can\neliminate the effect of the coherent noise and in the same time feedback the\ncorresponding noise parameters, which are beneficial to further improvements on\nthe experiment system. In particular, we consider two experiment-relevant\ncoherent noise models, one is from the unconscious phase accumulation on $N$\nqubits, the other is from the rotation on the control qubit. The protocol\neffectively realizes a family of entanglement witnesses by postprocessing the\nmeasurement results from $N+2$ local measurement settings, which only adds one\nmore setting than the original witness specialized for the GHZ state. Moreover,\nby considering the trade-off between the detection efficiency and the\nwhite-noise robustness, we further reduce the number of local measurements to 3\nwithout altering the performance on the coherent noise. Our protocol can\nenhance the entanglement detection under coherent noises and act as a benchmark\nfor the state-of-the-art quantum devices.\n

In this paper, we discuss some general connections between the notions of positive map, weak majorization and entropic inequalities in the context of detection of entanglement among bipartite quantum systems. First, basing on the fact that any positive map can be written as the difference between two completely positive maps Λ=Λ1−Λ2, we propose a possible way to generalize the Nielsen–Kempe majorization criterion. Then, we present two methods of derivation of some general classes of entropic inequalities useful for the detection of entanglement. While the first one follows from the aforementioned generalized majorization relation and the concept of Schur-concave decreasing functions, the second is based on some functional inequalities. What is important is that, contrary to the Nielsen–Kempe majorization criterion and entropic inequalities, our criteria allow for the detection of entangled states with positive partial transposition when using indecomposable positive maps. We also point out that if a state with at least one maximally mixed subsystem is detected by some necessary criterion based on the positive map Λ, then there exist entropic inequalities derived from Λ (by both procedures) that also detect this state. In this sense, they are equivalent to the necessary criterion [I⊗Λ](ϱAB)⩾0. Moreover, our inequalities provide a way of constructing multi-copy entanglement witnesses and therefore are promising from the experimental point of view. Finally, we discuss some of the derived inequalities in the context of the recently introduced protocol of state merging and the possibility of approximating the mean value of a linear entanglement witness.

Entanglement witnesses (EWs) are one of the most effective methods to detect entanglement. It is known that nonlinear EW provide better entanglement detection than their linear counterparts, in that the former detect a strictly larger subset of entangled states than the latter. Whether linear or nonlinear, the method is measurement-device dependent, so that imperfect measurements may cause false certification of entanglement in a shared state. Measurement-device-independent EW provide an escape from such measurement dependence of the entanglement detection for linear EW. Here we present measurement-device-independent nonlinear EW for non-positive partial transpose entangled states as well as for bound entangled states with positive partial transpose. Although the witness considered herein does not detect a larger set of entangled states than other nonlinear EW, it is more efficient in that it never leads to a false detection corresponding to wrong measurements. The constructed measurement-device-independent nonlinear EW certify the entanglement of the same sets of entangled states as their device-dependent parents do, and therefore are better than the linear EW, device-independent or otherwise.

Entanglement witnesses are invaluable for efficient quantum entanglement certification without the need for expensive quantum state tomography. Yet, standard entanglement witnessing requires multiple measurements and its bounds can be elusive as a result of experimental imperfections. Here, we introduce and demonstrate a novel procedure for entanglement detection which simply and seamlessly improves any standard witnessing procedure by using additional available information to tighten the witnessing bounds. Moreover, by relaxing the requirements on the witness operators, our method removes the general need for the difficult task of witness decomposition into local observables. We experimentally demonstrate entanglement detection with our approach using a separable test operator and a simple fixed measurement device for each agent. Finally, we show that the method can be generalized to higher-dimensional and multipartite cases with a complexity that scales linearly with the number of parties.

Violation of a Bell inequality certifies that the underlying state must be entangled in a device-independent way, although there exist some entangled states which do not violate such an inequality. However, for every entangled state, it is possible to find a Hermitian operator called an entanglement witness that can detect entanglement through some local measurements in a device-dependent method, but implementation of wrong measurements may lead to fake detection of entanglement. To avoid such difficulties, measurement-device-independent entanglement witness (MDI-EW) based on a semiquantum nonlocal game was proposed, which is not only robust against wrong measurements but also against a specific kind of lossy detectors. We employ here a measurement-device-independent entanglement witness to detect entanglement in a scenario where half of an entangled pair is possessed by a single observer while the other half is with multiple observers performing unsharp measurements, sequentially, independently, and preserving entanglement as much as possible. Interestingly, we find that the numbers of successful observers who can detect entanglement, measurement-device-independently, both with equal and unequal sharpness parameters of the noisy measurements, are greater than that obtained with standard and Bell-inequality-based entanglement detection methods, reflecting its robustness. The entanglement contents of the sequentially shared states are also analyzed. Unlike other scenarios, our investigations also reveal that in this measurement-device-independent situation, states having entanglement in proximity to maximal remain entangled until there are two sequential observers, even if they measure sharply.

For any $N\ensuremath{\bigotimes}N$-type bipartite system with even $Ng2$, two-parameter continuous families of unital block-dephasing quantum channels and of weakly optimal entanglement witnesses are constructed from special forms of a parametrized positive map. The parameter domains of the families are complementary subsets of a convex set and this fact reveals unusual combination rules of quantum channels and entanglement witnesses. These rules make it possible to develop many physically implementable direct entanglement-detection methods that provide a unified framework to accomplish both information-processing and entanglement-detection tasks by means of smooth quantum channels, without any reference to entanglement witnesses.

Entanglement detection is one of the most fundamental and practical tasks for quantum information processing. The framework of entanglement witnesses provides an experimentally feasible method detecting entangled states. Although It is clear that no entanglement witness per se can detect all entangled states, little is known about how useful a single entanglement witness is. In this work, we show that an entanglement witness can construct another entanglement witness. This means that the same measurement outcomes can be repeatedly applied to constructing different entanglement witnesses.

Many future quantum technologies rely on the generation of entangled states. Quantum devices will require verification of their operation below some error threshold, but the reliable detection of quantum entanglement remains a considerable challenge for large-scale quantum systems. Well-established techniques for this task rely on the measurement of expectation values of entanglement witnesses, which however require many measurements settings to be extracted. Here we develop a generic framework for efficient entanglement detection that translates any entanglement witness into a resource-efficient probabilistic scheme, whose confidence grows exponentially with the number of individual detection events, namely copies of the quantum state. To benchmark our findings, we experimentally verify the presence of entanglement in a photonic six-qubit cluster state generated using three single-photon sources operating at telecommunication wavelengths. We find that the presence of entanglement can be certified with at least 99:74% confidence by detecting 20 copies of the quantum state. Additionally, we show that genuine six-qubit entanglement is verified with at least 99% confidence by using 112 copies of the state. Our protocol can be carried out with a remarkably low number of copies and in the presence of experimental imperfections, making it a practical and applicable method to verify large-scale quantum devices.

Entanglement detection is one of the important topics in quantum information theory. Wootters formula can be seen as a high level criterion for entanglement detection or entanglement quantification. However, it is restricted to two-qubit system, and its generalization is also limited. Based on a thorough study of a three-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state mixed with a W state and white noise, we find a connection between Wootters formula and the matched entanglement witness. Further study shows that for a four-qubit GHZ state mixed with a Dicke state and white noise, there is a new kind of Wootters formula.

Multipartite entanglement plays an essential role in both quantum information science and many-body physics. Because of the exponentially large dimension and complex geometric structure of the state space, the detection of entanglement in many-body systems is extremely challenging in reality. Conventional means, like entanglement witness and entropy criterion, either highly depend on the prior knowledge of the studied systems or the detection capability is relatively weak. In this Letter, we propose a framework for designing multipartite entanglement criteria based on permutation moments, which have an effective implementation with either the generalized control-swap quantum circuits or the random unitary techniques. As an example, in the bipartite scenario, we develop an entanglement criterion that can detect bound entanglement and show strong detection capability in the multiqubit Ising model with a long-range XY Hamiltonian. In the multipartite case, the permutation-moment-based criteria can detect entangled states that are not detectable by any criteria extended from the bipartite case. Our framework also shows potential in entanglement quantification and entanglement structure detection.

All our former experience with application of quantum theory seems to say that what is predicted by quantum formalism must occur in the laboratory. But the essence of quantum formalism---entanglement, recognized by Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Schr\"odinger---waited over $70\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\text{years}$ to enter laboratories as a new resource as real as energy. This holistic property of compound quantum systems, which involves nonclassical correlations between subsystems, has potential for many quantum processes, including canonical ones: quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, and dense coding. However, it appears that this new resource is complex and difficult to detect. Although it is usually fragile to the environment, it is robust against conceptual and mathematical tools, the task of which is to decipher its rich structure. This article reviews basic aspects of entanglement including its characterization, detection, distillation, and quantification. In particular, various manifestations of entanglement via Bell inequalities, entropic inequalities, entanglement witnesses, and quantum cryptography are discussed, and some interrelations are pointed out. The basic role of entanglement in quantum communication within a distant laboratory paradigm is stressed, and some peculiarities such as the irreversibility of entanglement manipulations are also discussed including its extremal form---the bound entanglement phenomenon. The basic role of entanglement witnesses in detection of entanglement is emphasized.

Entanglement between individual spins can be detected by using thermodynamics\nquantities as entanglement witnesses. This applies to collective spins also,\nprovided that their internal degrees of freedom are frozen, as in the limit of\nweakly-coupled nanomagnets. Here, we extend such approach to the detection of\nentanglement between subsystems of a spin cluster, beyond such weak-coupling\nlimit. The resulting inequalities are violated in spin clusters with different\ngeometries, thus allowing the detection of zero- and finite-temperature\nentanglement. Under relevant and experimentally verifiable conditions, all the\nrequired expectation values can be traced back to correlation functions of\nindividual spins, that are now made selectively available by four-dimensional\ninelastic neutron scattering.\n