Separability of Hermitian tensors and PSD decompositions

Abstract

Hermitian tensors are natural generalizations of Hermitian matrices, while possessing rather different properties. A Hermitian tensor is separable if it has a Hermitian decomposition with only positive coefficients, i.e. it is a sum of rank-1 psd Hermitian tensors. This paper studies how to detect the separability of Hermitian tensors. It is equivalent to the long-standing quantum separability problem in quantum physics, which asks to tell if a given quantum state is entangled or not. We formulate this as a truncated moment problem and then provide a semidefinite relaxation algorithm to solve it. Moreover, we study psd decompositions of separable Hermitian tensors. When the psd rank is low, we first flatten them into cubic order tensors and then apply tensor decomposition methods to compute psd decompositions. We prove that this method works well if the psd rank is low. In computation, this flattening approach can detect the separability for much larger-sized Hermitian tensors. This method is a good starting point to determine psd ranks of separable Hermitian tensors.