The maximally entangled set of 4-qubit states Articles uri icon

publication date

  • May 2016

issue

  • 5

volume

  • 57

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0022-2488

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1089-7658

abstract

  • Entanglement is a resource to overcome the natural restriction of operations used for state manipulation to Local Operations assisted by Classical Communication (LOCC). Hence, a bipartite maximally entangled state is a state which can be transformed deterministically into any other state via LOCC. In the multipartite setting no such state exists. There, rather a whole set, the Maximally Entangled Set of states (MES), which we recently introduced, is required. This set has on the one hand the property that any state outside of this set can be obtained via LOCC from one of the states within the set and on the other hand, no state in the set can be obtained from any other state via LOCC. Recently, we studied LOCC transformations among pure multipartite states and derived the MES for three and generic four qubit states. Here, we consider the non-generic four qubit states and analyze their properties regarding local transformations. As already the most coarse grained classification, due to Stochastic LOCC (SLOCC), of four qubit states is much richer than in case of three qubits, the investigation of possible LOCC transformations is correspondingly more difficult. We prove that most SLOCC classes show a similar behavior as the generic states, however we also identify here three classes with very distinct properties. The first consists of the GHZ and W class, where any state can be transformed into some other state non-trivially. In particular, there exists no isolation. On the other hand, there also exist classes where all states are isolated. Last but not least we identify an additional class of states, whose transformation properties differ drastically from all the other classes.