Entanglement plays a central role in the field of quantum information science. It is well known that the degree of entanglement cannot be increased under local operations. Here, we show that the concurrence of a bipartite entangled state can be increased under the local PT -symmetric operation. This violates the property of entanglement monotonicity. We also use the Bell-CHSH and steering inequalities to explore this phenomenon.
We investigate the phenomenon of bipartite entanglement revivals under purely local operations in systems subject to local and independent classical noise sources. We explain this apparent paradox in the physical ensemble description of the system state by introducing the concept of hidden entanglement, which indicates the amount of entanglement that cannot be exploited due to the lack of classical information on the system. For this reason this part of entanglement can be recovered without the action of non-local operations or back-transfer process. For two noninteracting qubits under a low-frequency stochastic noise, we show that entanglement can be recovered by local pulses only. We also discuss how hidden entanglement may provide new insights about entanglement revivals in non-Markovian dynamics.
Multi-party local quantum operations with shared quantum entanglement or shared classical randomness are studied. The following facts are established: (i) There is a ball of local operations with shared randomness lying within the space spanned by the no-signaling operations and centred at the completely noisy channel. (ii) The existence of the ball of local operations with shared randomness is employed to prove that the weak membership problem for local operations with shared entanglement is strongly NP-hard. (iii) Local operations with shared entanglement are characterized in terms of linear functionals that are ``completely positive on a certain cone K of separable Hermitian operators, under a natural notion of complete positivity appropriate to that cone. Local operations with shared randomness (but not entanglement) are also characterized in terms of linear functionals that are merely positive on that same cone K. (iv) Existing characterizations of no-signaling operations are generalized to the multi-party setting and recast in terms of the Choi-Jamiolkowski representation for quantum super-operators. It is noted that the standard nonlocal box is an example of a no-signaling operation that is separable, yet cannot be implemented by local operations with shared entanglement.
In many applications entanglement must be distributed through noisy communication channels that unavoidably degrade it. Entanglement cannot be generated by local operations and classical communication (LOCC), implying that once it has been distributed it is not possible to recreate it by LOCC. Recovery of entanglement by purely local control is however not forbidden in the presence of non-Markovian dynamics, and here we demonstrate in two all-optical experiments that such entanglement restoration can even be achieved on-demand. First, we implement an open-loop control scheme based on a purely local operation, without acquiring any information on the environment; then, we use a closed-loop scheme in which the environment is measured, the outcome controling the local operations on the system. The restored entanglement is a manifestation of hidden quantum correlations resumed by the local control. Relying on local control, both schemes improve the efficiency of entanglement sharing in distributed quantum networks.
Simple examples are constructed that show the entanglement of two qubits being both increased and decreased by interactions on just one of them. One of the two qubits interacts with a third qubit, a control, that is never entangled or correlated with either of the two entangled qubits and is never entangled, but becomes correlated, with the system of those two qubits. The two entangled qubits do not interact, but their state can change from maximally entangled to separable or from separable to maximally entangled. Similar changes for the two qubits are made with a swap operation between one of the qubits and a control; then there are compensating changes of entanglement that involve the control. When the entanglement increases, the map that describes the change of the state of the two entangled qubits is not completely positive. Combination of two independent interactions that individually give exponential decay of the entanglement can cause the entanglement to not decay exponentially but, instead, go to zero at a finite time.
We study the task of entanglement distillation in the one-shot setting under different classes of quantum operations which extend the set of local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Establishing a general formalism which allows for a straightforward comparison of their exact achievable performance, we relate the fidelity of distillation under these classes of operations with a family of entanglement monotones and the rates of distillation with a class of smoothed entropic quantities based on the hypothesis testing relative entropy. We then characterise exactly the one-shot distillable entanglement of several classes of quantum states and reveal many simplifications in their manipulation. We show in particular that the $varepsilon$-error one-shot distillable entanglement of any pure state is the same under all sets of operations ranging from one-way LOCC to separability-preserving operations or operations preserving the set of states with positive partial transpose, and can be computed exactly as a quadratically constrained linear program. We establish similar operational equivalences in the distillation of isotropic and maximally correlated states, reducing the computation of the relevant quantities to linear or semidefinite programs. We also show that all considered sets of operations achieve the same performance in environment-assisted entanglement distillation from any state.