Variational Characterisations of Separability and Entanglement of Formation

In this paper we develop a mathematical framework for the characterisation of separability and entanglement of formation (EoF) of general bipartite states. These characterisations are of the variational kind, meaning that separability and EoF are given in terms of a function which is to be minimized over the manifold of unitary matrices. A major benefit of such a characterisation is that it directly leads to a numerical procedure for calculating EoF. We present an efficient minimisation algorithm and an apply it to the bound entangled 3X3 Horodecki states; we show that their EoF is very low and that their distance to the set of separable states is also very low. Within the same variational framework we rephrase the results by Wootters (W. Wootters, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2245 (1998)) on EoF for 2X2 states and present progress in generalising these results to higher dimensional systems.Comment: 11 pages RevTeX, 4 figure

On the geometry of entangled states

The basic question that is addressed in this paper is finding the closest separable state for a given entangled state, measured with the Hilbert Schmidt distance. While this problem is in general very hard, we show that the following strongly related problem can be solved: find the Hilbert Schmidt distance of an entangled state to the set of all partially transposed states. We prove that this latter distance can be expressed as a function of the negative eigenvalues of the partial transpose of the entangled state, and show how it is related to the distance of a state to the set of positive partially transposed states (PPT-states). We illustrate this by calculating the closest biseparable state to the W-state, and give a simple and very general proof for the fact that the set of W-type states is not of measure zero. Next we show that all surfaces with states whose partial transposes have constant minimal negative eigenvalue are similar to the boundary of PPT states. We illustrate this with some examples on bipartite qubit states, where contours of constant negativity are plotted on two-dimensional intersections of the complete state space.Comment: submitted to Journal of Modern Optic