Asymptotic Indistinguishability of Bipartite Quantum States by Operations Completely Preserving Positivity of Partial Transpose

Yinan Li, Xin Wang, Runyao Duan

Published 2017-02-01Version 1

A bipartite subspace $S$ is called strongly positive-partial-transpose-unextendible (PPT-unextendible) if for every positive integer $k$, there is no PPT state supporting on the orthogonal complement of $S^{\otimes k}$. We show that a subspace is strongly PPT-unextendible if it contains a PPT-definite operator (a positive semidefinite operator whose partial transpose is positive definite). Applying this result, we demonstrate a simple criterion for verifying whether a set of bipartite quantum states is asymptotically indistinguishable by operations completely preserving positivity of partial transpose. This criterion is based on the observation that if the support of some bipartite state is strongly PPT-unextendible, then any set of bipartite quantum states which contains this state cannot be asymptotically distinguished by PPT operations. Utilizing this criterion, we further show that any entangled pure state and its orthogonal complement cannot be distinguished asymptotically by PPT operations. Meanwhile, we also investigate that the minimum dimension of strongly PPT-unextendible subspaces in a $m\otimes n$ system is $m+n-1$, which involves an extension of the result that non-positive-partial-transpose (NPT) subspaces can be as large as any entangled subspace [N. Johnston, Phys. Rev. A 87: 064302 (2013)].