Characterizing the boundary of the set of absolutely separable states and their generation via noisy environments

Abstract

We characterize the boundary of the convex compact set of absolutely separable states, referred as AS, that cannot be transformed to entangled states by global unitary operators, in 2⊗ d Hilbert space. However, we show that the absolutely separable states of rank-(2d− 1) are extreme points of such sets. We then discuss conditions to examine if a given full-rank absolutely separable state is an interior point or a boundary point of AS. Moreover, we construct two-qubit absolutely separable states which are boundary points but not extreme points of AS and prove the existence of full-rank extreme points of AS. Properties of certain interior points are also explored. We further show that by examining the boundary of the above set, it is possible to develop an algorithm to generate the absolutely separable states which stay outside the maximal ball. By considering paradigmatic noise models, we find the amount of local noise which the input entangled states can sustain, so that the output states do not become absolutely separable. Interestingly, we report that with the decrease of entanglement of the pure input state, critical depolarizing noise value, transferring an entangled state to an absolutely separable one, increases, thereby showing advantages of sharing nonmaximally entangled states. Furthermore, when the input two-qubit states are Haar uniformly generated, we report a hierarchy among quantum channels according to the generation of absolutely separable states.