The geometry of entanglement and Grover's algorithm

Abstract

A measure of entanglement with respect to a bipartite partition of n-qubit has been defined and studied from the viewpoint of Riemannian geometry (Iwai 2007 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 40 12161). This paper has two aims. One is to study further the geometry of entanglement, and the other is to investigate Grover's search algorithms, both the original and the fixed-point ones, in reference with entanglement. As the distance between the maximally entangled states and the separable states is known already in the previous paper, this paper determines the set of maximally entangled states nearest to a typical separable state which is used as an initial state in Grover's search algorithms, and to find geodesic segments which realize the above-mentioned distance. As for Grover's algorithms, it is already known that while the initial and the target states are separable, the algorithms generate sequences of entangled states. This fact is confirmed also in the entanglement measure proposed in the previous paper, and then a split Grover algorithm is proposed which generates sequences of separable states only with respect to the bipartite partition.