Characterization and properties of weakly optimal entanglement witnesses

Bang-Hai Wang, Hai-Ru Xu, Steve Campbell, Simone Severini

Published 2014-07-03, updated 2015-07-12Version 3

We present an analysis of the properties and characteristics of weakly optimal entanglement witnesses, that is witnesses whose expectation value vanishes on at least one product vector. Any weakly optimal entanglement witness can be written as the form of $W^{wopt}=\sigma-c_{\sigma}^{max} I$, where $c_{\sigma}^{max}$ is a non-negative number and $I$ is the identity matrix. We show the relation between the weakly optimal witness $W^{wopt}$ and the eigenvalues of the separable states $\sigma$. Further we give an application of weakly optimal witnesses for constructing entanglement witnesses in a larger Hilbert space by extending the result of [P. Badzi\c{a}g {\it et al}, Phys. Rev. A {\bf 88}, 010301(R) (2013)], and we examine their geometric properties.