Understanding entanglement as resource: locally distinguishing unextendible product bases

TL;DR

This paper investigates the role of entanglement as a resource in locally distinguishing unextendible product bases (UPBs), proposing more efficient protocols than teleportation and providing insights into entanglement's usefulness.

Contribution

It introduces entanglement-efficient protocols for LOCC discrimination of UPBs and offers general insights into the resource's role in such quantum tasks.

Findings

Protocols outperform teleportation in entanglement efficiency

Provides conditions under which UPBs can be distinguished locally

Offers theoretical insights into entanglement's utility in quantum discrimination

Abstract

It is known that the states in an unextendible product basis (UPB) cannot be distinguished perfectly when the parties are restricted to local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Previous discussions of such bases have left open the following question: What entanglement resources are necessary and/or sufficient for this task to be possible with LOCC? In this paper, I present protocols which use entanglement more efficiently than teleportation to distinguish certain classes of UPB's. The ideas underlying my approach to this problem offer rather general insight into why entanglement is useful for such tasks.