Quantum Separability and Entanglement Detection via EntanglementWitness Search and Global.pdfVIP

Quantum Separability and Entanglement Detection via Entanglement-Witness Search and Global Optimization Lawrence M. Ioannou1 and Benjamin C. Travaglione1 1 Centre for Quantum Computation, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0WA, UK We focus on determining the separability of an unknown bipartite quantum state ρ by invoking a sufficiently large subset of all possible entanglement witnesses given the expected value of each element of a set of mutually orthogonal observables. We review the concept of an entanglement witness from the geometrical point of view and use this geometry to show that the set of separable states is not a polytope and to characterize the class of entanglement witnesses (observables) that detect entangled states on opposite sides of the set of separable states. All this serves to motivate a 6 classical algorithm which, given the expected values of a subset of an orthogonal basis of observables 0 of an otherwise unknown quantum state, searches for an entanglement witness in the span of the 0 subset of observables. The idea of such an algorithm, which is an efficient reduction of the quantum 2 separability problem to a global optimization problem, was introduced in PRA 70 060303(R), where it was shown to be an improvement on the naive approach for the quantum separability problem n (exhaustive search for a dec