Reflections upon separability and distillability

Abstract

We present an abstract formulation of the so-called Innsbruck-Hannover programme that investigates quantum correlations and entanglement in terms of convex sets. We present a unified description of optimal decompositions of quantum states and the optimization of witness operators that detect whether a given state belongs to a given convex set. We illustrate the abstract formulation with several examples, and discuss relations between optimal entanglement witnesses and n-copy non-distillable states with non-positive partial transpose.

12 pages, 7 figures, proceedings of the ESF QIT Conference Gdansk, July 2001, submitted to special issue of J. Mod. Opt