Should Entanglement Measures be Monogamous or Faithful?

Cécilia Lancien, Sara Di Martino, Marcus Huber, Marco Piani, Gerardo Adesso, Andreas Winter

Published 2016-04-07Version 1

"Is entanglement monogamous?" asks the title of a popular article [B. Terhal, IBM J. Res. Dev. 48, 71 (2004)], celebrating C. H. Bennett's legacy on quantum information theory. While the answer is certainly affirmative in the qualitative sense, the situation is far less clear if monogamy is intended as a quantitative limitation on the distribution of bipartite entanglement in a multipartite system, given some particular measure of entanglement. Here, we clarify the most general form of a universal quantitative monogamy relation for a bipartite measure of entanglement. We then go on to show that an important class of entanglement measures fail to be monogamous in this most general sense of the term, with monogamy violations becoming generic with increasing dimension. In particular, we show that entanglement measures cannot satisfy monogamy while at the same time faithfully capturing the entanglement of the fully antisymmetric state in arbitrary dimension. Nevertheless, monogamy can be recovered if one allows for dimension-dependent relations, as we show explicitly with relevant examples.