Karl Gerd H. Vollbrecht

Entanglement measures under symmetry

We show how to simplify the computation of the entanglement of formation and the relative entropy of entanglement for states, which are invariant under a group of local symmetries. For several examples of groups we characterize the state spaces, which are invariant under these groups. For specific examples we calculate the entanglement measures. In particular, we derive an explicit formula for the entanglement of formation for

Entanglement of formation for isotropic states

(U\ensuremath{\bigotimes}U)

Quantum Metropolis sampling

-invariant states, and we find a counterexample of the additivity conjecture for the relative entropy of entanglement.

Conditional entropies and their relation to entanglement criteria

We give an explicit expression for the entanglement of formation for isotropic density matrices in arbitrary dimensions in terms of the convex hull of a simple function. For two qutrit isotropic states we determine the convex hull and we have strong evidence for its exact form for arbitrary dimension. Unlike for two qubits, the entanglement of formation for two qutrits or more is found to be a nonanalytic function of the maximally entangled fraction in the regime where the density matrix is entangled.

Why two qubits are special

The original motivation to build a quantum computer came from Feynman, who imagined a machine capable of simulating generic quantum mechanical systems—a task that is believed to be intractable for classical computers. Such a machine could have far-reaching applications in the simulation of many-body quantum physics in condensed-matter, chemical and high-energy systems. Part of Feynman’s challenge was met by Lloyd, who showed how to approximately decompose the time evolution operator of interacting quantum particles into a short sequence of elementary gates, suitable for operation on a quantum computer. However, this left open the problem of how to simulate the equilibrium and static properties of quantum systems. This requires the preparation of ground and Gibbs states on a quantum computer. For classical systems, this problem is solved by the ubiquitous Metropolis algorithm, a method that has basically acquired a monopoly on the simulation of interacting particles. Here we demonstrate how to implement a quantum version of the Metropolis algorithm. This algorithm permits sampling directly from the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, and thus evades the sign problem present in classical simulations. A small-scale implementation of this algorithm should be achievable with today’s technology.

Entanglement distillation by dissipation and continuous quantum repeaters.

We discuss conditional Renyi and Tsallis entropies for bipartite quantum systems of finite dimension. We investigate the relation between the positivity of conditional entropies and entanglement properties. It is in particular shown that any state having a negative conditional entropy with respect to any value of the entropic parameter is distillable since it violates the reduction criterion. Moreover, we show that the entanglement of Werner states in odd dimensions can neither be detected by entropic criteria nor by any other spectral criterion.

Interpolation of recurrence and hashing entanglement distillation protocols

We analyze some special properties of a system of two qubits, and in particular of the so-called Bell basis for this system, and discuss the possibility of extending these properties to higher dimensional systems. We give a general construction for orthonormal bases of maximally entangled vectors, which works in any dimension, and is based on Latin squares and complex Hadamard matrices. However, for none of these bases the special properties of the operation of complex conjugation in Bell basis hold, namely that maximally entangled vectors have up-to-a-phase real coefficients and that factorizable unitaries have real matrix elements.

Asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement for orthogonally invariant states

Even though entanglement is very vulnerable to interactions with the environment, it can be created by purely dissipative processes. Yet, the attainable degree of entanglement is profoundly limited in the presence of noise sources. We show that distillation can also be realized dissipatively, such that a highly entangled steady state is obtained. The schemes put forward here display counterintuitive phenomena, such as improved performance if noise is added to the system. We also show how dissipative distillation can be employed in a continuous quantum repeater architecture, in which the resources scale polynomially with the distance.

Distillability via Protocols Respecting the Positivity of Partial Transpose

We construct interesting entanglement distillation protocols by interpolating between the recurrence and hashing protocols. This leads to asymptotic two-way distillation protocols, resulting in an improvement of the distillation rate for all mixed Bell diagonal entangled states, even for the ones with very high fidelity. We also present a method for how entanglement-assisted distillation protocol can be converted into nonentanglement-assisted protocols with the same yield.

Quantum Simulators, Continuous-Time Automata, and Translationally Invariant Systems

For a special class of bipartite states we calculate explicitly the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement