Transformations among Pure Multipartite Entangled States via Local Operations are Almost Never Possible

• Main Authors: David Sauerwein, Nolan R. Wallach, Gilad Gour, Barbara Kraus
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society 2018-07-01
• Series: Physical Review X
• Online Access: http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.8.031020

Local operations assisted by classical communication (LOCC) constitute the free operations in entanglement theory. Hence, the determination of LOCC transformations is crucial for the understanding of entanglement. We characterize here almost all LOCC transformations among pure multipartite multilevel states. Combined with the analogous results for qubit states shown by Gour et al. [J. Math. Phys. (N.Y.) 58, 092204 (2017)JMAPAQ0022-248810.1063/1.5003015], this gives a characterization of almost all local transformations among multipartite pure states. We show that nontrivial LOCC transformations among generic, fully entangled, pure states are almost never possible. Thus, almost all multipartite states are isolated. They can neither be deterministically obtained from local-unitary-inequivalent (LU-inequivalent) states via local operations, nor can they be deterministically transformed to pure, fully entangled LU-inequivalent states. In order to derive this result, we prove a more general statement, namely, that, generically, a state possesses no nontrivial local symmetry. We discuss further consequences of this result for the characterization of optimal, probabilistic single-copy and probabilistic multicopy LOCC transformations and the characterization of LU-equivalence classes of multipartite pure states.