Suppose two distant observers Alice and Bob share a pure biparticle entangled state secretly chosen from a set, it is shown that Alice (Bob) can probabilistic concentrate the state to a maximally entangled state by applying local operations and classical communication (LQCC) if and only if the states in the set share the same marginal density operator for her (his) subsystem. Applying this result, we present probabilistic superdense coding and show that perfect purification of mixed state is impossible using only LQCC on individual particles.
Quantum entanglement of pure states is usually quantified via the entanglement entropy, the von Neumann entropy of the reduced state. Entanglement entropy is closely related to entanglement distillation, a process for converting quantum states into singlets, which can then be used for various quantum technological tasks. The relation between entanglement entropy and entanglement distillation has been known only for the asymptotic setting, and the meaning of entanglement entropy in the single-copy regime has so far remained open. Here we close this gap by considering entanglement catalysis. We prove that entanglement entropy completely characterizes state transformations in the presence of entangled catalysts. Our results imply that entanglement entropy quantifies the amount of entanglement available in a bipartite pure state to be used for quantum information processing, giving asymptotic results an operational meaning also in the single-copy setup.
The states of three-qubit systems split into two inequivalent types of genuine tripartite entanglement, namely the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) type and the $W$ type. A state belonging to one of these classes can be stochastically transformed only into a state within the same class by local operations and classical communications. We provide local quantum operations, consisting of the most general two-outcome measurement operators, for the deterministic transformations of three-qubit pure states in which the initial and the target states are in the same class. We explore these transformations, originally having standard GHZ and standard $W$ states, under the local measurement operations carried out by a single party and $p$ ($p=2,3$) parties (successively). We find a notable result that the standard GHZ state cannot be deterministically transformed to a GHZ-type state in which all its bipartite entanglements are nonzero, i.e., a transformation can be achieved with unit probability when the target state has at least one vanishing bipartite concurrence.
Entanglement swapping has played an important role in quantum information processing, and become one of the necessary core technologies in the future quantum network. In this paper, we study entanglement swapping for multi-particle pure states and maximally entangled states in qudit systems. We generalize the entanglement swapping of two pure states from the case where each quantum system contains two particles to the case of containing any number of particles, and consider the entanglement swapping between any number of systems. We also generalize the entanglement swapping chain of bipartite pure states to the one of multi-particle pure states. In addition, we consider the entanglement swapping chains for maximally entangled states.
A set of quantum states is said to be absolutely entangled, when at least one state in the set remains entangled for any definition of subsystems, i.e. for any choice of the global reference frame. In this work we investigate the properties of absolutey entangled sets (AES) of pure quantum states. For the case of a two-qubit system, we present a sufficient condition to detect an AES, and use it to construct families of $N$ states such that $N-3$ (the maximal possible number) remain entangled for any definition of subsystems. For a general bipartition $d=d_1d_2$, we prove that sets of $N>leftlfloor{(d_{1}+1)(d_{2}+1)/2}right rfloor$ states are AES with Haar measure 1. Then, we define AES for multipartitions. We derive a general lower bound on the number of states in an AES for a given multipartition, and also construct explicit examples. In particular, we exhibit an AES with respect to any possible multi-partitioning of the total system.
We investigate genuinely entangled $N$-qubit states with no $N$-partite correlations in the case of symmetric states. Using a tensor representation for mixed symmetric states, we obtain a simple characterization of the absence of $N$-partite correlations. We show that symmetric states with no $N$-partite correlations cannot exist for an even number of qubits. We fully identify the set of genuinely entangled symmetric states with no $N$-partite correlations in the case of three qubits, and in the case of rank-2 states. We present a general procedure to construct families for an arbitrary odd number of qubits.