Certifying Separability in Symmetric Mixed States, and Superradiance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for certifying separability in symmetric mixed quantum states, enabling precise analysis of entanglement formation and demonstrating that superradiance does not generate entanglement.

Contribution

It develops a sufficient and necessary separability criterion for diagonally symmetric states, advancing entanglement analysis in many-body quantum systems.

Findings

Entanglement is not generated in idealized Dicke model superradiance.

The criterion is fully complete for diagonally symmetric states.

The method provides a practical way to certify separability in complex states.

Abstract

Separability criteria are typically of the necessary, but not sufficient, variety, in that satisfying some separability criterion, such as positivity of eigenvalues under partial transpose, does not strictly imply separability. Certifying separability amounts to proving the existence of a decomposition of a target mixed state into some convex combination of separable states; determining the existence of such a decomposition is "hard." We show that it is effective to ask, instead, if the target mixed state "fits" some preconstructed separable form, in that one can generate a sufficient separability criterion relevant to all target states in some family by ensuring enough degrees of freedom in the preconstructed separable form. We demonstrate this technique by inducing a sufficient criterion for "diagonally symmetric" states of N qubits. A sufficient separability criterion opens the door to study precisely how entanglement is (not) formed; we use ours to prove that, counterintuitively, entanglement is not generated in idealized Dicke model superradiance despite its exemplification of many-body effects. We introduce a quantification of the extent to which a given preconstructed parametrization comprises the set of all separable states; for "diagonally symmetric" states our preconstruction is shown to be fully complete. This implies that our criterion is necessary in addition to sufficient, among other ramifications which we explore.