Guifre Vidal

COMPUTABLE MEASURE OF ENTANGLEMENT

We present a measure of entanglement that can be computed effectively for any mixed state of an arbitrary bipartite system. We show that it does not increase under local manipulations of the system, and use it to obtain a bound on the teleportation capacity and on the distillable entanglement of mixed states.

Three qubits can be entangled in two inequivalent ways

Invertible local transformations of a multipartite system are used to define equivalence classes in the set of entangled states. This classification concerns the entanglement properties of a single copy of the state. Accordingly, we say that two states have the same kind of entanglement if both of them can be obtained from the other by means of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) with nonzero probability. When applied to pure states of a three-qubit system, this approach reveals the existence of two inequivalent kinds of genuine tripartite entanglement, for which the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state and a W state appear as remarkable representatives. In particular, we show that the W state retains maximally bipartite entanglement when any one of the three qubits is traced out. We generalize our results both to the case of higher-dimensional subsystems and also to more than three subsystems, for all of which we show that, typically, two randomly chosen pure states cannot be converted into each other by means of LOCC, not even with a small probability of success.

Entanglement in quantum critical phenomena

Entanglement, one of the most intriguing features of quantum theory and a main resource in quantum information science, is expected to play a crucial role also in the study of quantum phase transitions, where it is responsible for the appearance of long-range correlations. We investigate, through a microscopic calculation, the scaling properties of entanglement in spin chain systems, both near and at a quantum critical point. Our results establish a precise connection between concepts of quantum information, condensed matter physics, and quantum field theory, by showing that the behavior of critical entanglement in spin systems is analogous to that of entropy in conformal field theories. We explore some of the implications of this connection.

Efficient classical simulation of slightly entangled quantum computations

We present a classical protocol to efficiently simulate any pure-state quantum computation that involves only a restricted amount of entanglement. More generally, we show how to classically simulate pure-state quantum computations on n qubits by using computational resources that grow linearly in n and exponentially in the amount of entanglement in the quantum computer. Our results imply that a necessary condition for an exponential computational speedup (with respect to classical computations) is that the amount of entanglement increases with the size n of the computation, and provide an explicit lower bound on the required growth.

Efficient Simulation of One-Dimensional Quantum Many-Body Systems

We present a numerical method to simulate the time evolution, according to a generic Hamiltonian made of local interactions, of quantum spin chains and systems alike. The efficiency of the scheme depends on the amount of entanglement involved in the simulated evolution. Numerical analysis indicates that this method can be used, for instance, to efficiently compute time-dependent properties of low-energy dynamics in sufficiently regular but otherwise arbitrary one-dimensional quantum many-body systems. As by-products, we describe two alternatives to the density matrix renormalization group method.

Class of quantum many-body states that can be efficiently simulated.

We introduce the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz, a class of quantum many-body states on a D-dimensional lattice that can be efficiently simulated with a classical computer, in that the expectation value of local observables can be computed exactly and efficiently. The multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz is equivalent to a quantum circuit of logarithmic depth that has a very characteristic causal structure. It is also the ansatz underlying entanglement renormalization, a novel coarse-graining scheme for many-body quantum systems on a lattice.

Robustness of entanglement

In the quest to completely describe entanglement in the general case of a finite number of parties sharing a physical system of finite-dimensional Hilbert space an entanglement magnitude is introduced for its pure and mixed states: robustness. It corresponds to the minimal amount of mixing with locally prepared states which washes out all entanglement. It quantifies in a sense the endurance of entanglement against noise and jamming. Its properties are studied comprehensively. Analytical expressions for the robustness are given for pure states of two-party systems, and analytical bounds for mixed states of two-party systems. Specific results are obtained mainly for the qubit-qubit system (qubit denotes quantum bit). As by-products local pseudomixtures are generalized, a lower bound for the relative volume of separable states is deduced, and arguments for considering convexity a necessary condition of any entanglement measure are put forward.

Classical simulation of infinite-size quantum lattice systems in two spatial dimensions.

We present an algorithm to simulate two-dimensional quantum lattice systems in the thermodynamic limit. Our approach builds on the projected entangled-pair state algorithm for finite lattice systems [F. Verstraete and J. I. Cirac, arxiv:cond-mat/0407066] and the infinite time-evolving block decimation algorithm for infinite one-dimensional lattice systems [G. Vidal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 070201 (2007)10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.070201]. The present algorithm allows for the computation of the ground state and the simulation of time evolution in infinite two-dimensional systems that are invariant under translations. We demonstrate its performance by obtaining the ground state of the quantum Ising model and analyzing its second order quantum phase transition.

Mixed-state dynamics in one-dimensional quantum lattice systems: a time-dependent superoperator renormalization algorithm.

We present an algorithm to study mixed-state dynamics in one-dimensional quantum lattice systems. The algorithm can be used, e.g., to construct thermal states or to simulate real time evolution given by a generic master equation. Its two main ingredients are (i) a superoperator renormalization scheme to efficiently describe the state of the system and (ii) the time evolving block decimation technique to efficiently update the state during a time evolution. The computational cost of a simulation increases significantly with the amount of correlations between subsystems, but it otherwise depends only linearly on the system size. We present simulations involving quantum spins and fermions in one spatial dimension.

Classical simulation of quantum many-body systems with a tree tensor network

We show how to efficiently simulate a quantum many-body system with tree structure when its entanglement (Schmidt number) is small for any bipartite split along an edge of the tree. As an application, we show that any one-way quantum computation on a tree graph can be efficiently simulated with a classical computer.