Testing for a pure state with local operations and classical communication

Michael Nathanson

Published 2009-06-12, updated 2010-04-11Version 2

We examine the problem of using local operations and classical communication (LOCC) to distinguish a known pure state from an unknown (possibly mixed) state, bounding the error probability from above and below. We study the asymptotic rate of detecting multiple copies of the pure state and show that, if the overlap of the two states is great enough, then they can be distinguished asymptotically as well with LOCC as with global measurements; otherwise, the maximal Schmidt coefficient of the pure state is sufficient to determine the asymptotic error rate.