Month: September 2024

Wednesday, October 9, 2024 - 15:00
Thursday, October 10, 2024 - 11:30

Sala Consiglio (7th floor), D-Mat
Mathematics Department of PoliMi
Campus Leonardo, bd.14 "Nave".

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A quantitative approach to entanglement theory via hypothesis testing (Oct. 9)

I will start by presenting the notion of entanglement as studied in quantum information theory. According to this definition, originally proposed by Werner in 1989, a density operator on a bipartite quantum system is declared to be entangled if it cannot be written as a convex combination of tensor products of single-system density operators, and separable (or unentangled) otherwise. I will then discuss the basics of quantum hypothesis testing and introduce the task of “entanglement testing”, which consists in discriminating a given entangled state from the set of all separable states. This task is a fundamental quantum information primitive, with applications ranging from device certification to gravitational entanglement detection. I will finish by discussing the statement of the “generalised quantum Stein’s lemma”, which connects the ultimate efficiency of entanglement testing with a key entanglement measure known as “relative entropy of entanglement”.

A solution of the generalised quantum Stein’s lemma (Oct. 10)

I will discuss the solution of the generalised quantum Stein’s lemma presented in [Lami, arXiv:2408.06410] (see also [Hayashi/Yamasaki, arXiv:2408.02722] forrelated work), which establishes that the Stein exponent associated with entanglement testing, namely, the quantum hypothesis testing task of distinguishing between n copies of an entangled state and a generic separable state, equals the regularised relative entropy of entanglement. To solve the problem I will briefly introduce two techniques. The first is a procedure called “blurring”, which, informally, transforms a permutationally symmetric state by making it more evenly spread across nearby type classes. I will discuss this technique extensively in the classical case, where it already suffices to prove the generalised Stein’s lemma. Depending on time, I will then present a second technical innovation, which is needed to prove the quantum version of the statement. This consists in a second quantisation step, which lifts the problem from a finite-dimensional system to an infinite-dimensionalbosonic quantum system, where it can then be solved with techniques from continuous-variable quantum information. Rather remarkably, the second-quantised action of the blurring map corresponds to a pure loss channel.


This initiative is part of the “PhD Lectures” activity of the project “Departments of Excellence 2023-2027” of the Department of Mathematics of Politecnico di Milano. This activity consists of seminars open to PhD students, followed by meetings with the speaker to discuss and go into detail on the topics presented at the talk.