Direct detection of quantum entanglement

Pawel Horodecki, Artur Ekert

Published 2001-11-11Version 1

Quantum entanglement, after playing a significant role in the development of the foundations of quantum mechanics, has been recently rediscovered as a new physical resource with potential commercial applications such as, for example, quantum cryptography, better frequency standards or quantum-enhanced positioning and clock synchronization. On the mathematical side the studies of entanglement have revealed very interesting connections with the theory of positive maps. The capacity to generate entangled states is one of the basic requirements for building quantum computers. Hence, efficient experimental methods for detection, verification and estimation of quantum entanglement are of great practical importance. Here, we propose an experimentally viable, \emph{direct} detection of quantum entanglement which is efficient and does not require any \emph{a priori} knowledge about the quantum state. In a particular case of two entangled qubits it provides an estimation of the amount of entanglement. We view this method as a new form of quantum computation, namely, as a decision problem with quantum data structure.