Irreversibility of Asymptotic Entanglement Manipulation Under Quantum Operations Completely Preserving Positivity of Partial Transpose

Abstract

We demonstrate the irreversibility of asymptotic entanglement manipulation under quantum operations that completely preserve positivity of partial transpose (PPT), which resolves a major open problem in quantum information theory. To be more specific, we show that for any rank-two mixed state supporting on the $3øtimes3$ antisymmetric subspace, the amount of distillable entanglement by PPT operations is strictly smaller than one entanglement bit (ebit) while its entanglement cost under PPT operations is exactly one ebit. As a byproduct, we find that for this class of quantum states, both the Rains' bound and its regularization, are strictly less than the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement with respect to PPT states. So in general there is no unique entanglement measure for the manipulation of entanglement by PPT operations. We further present a feasible sufficient condition for the irreversibility of entanglement manipulation under PPT operations.

Publication
Physical Review Letters