On the separability of Bell-diagonal states with absolutely positive partial transposition
Abstract
Absolutely positive partial transpose (APPT) states, which remain PPT under every global unitary, provide a spectral relaxation of absolutely separable states, which remain separable under every such transformation. Despite substantial progress, whether these two notions coincide beyond qubit-qudit systems remains unresolved, motivating the study of structured state families in which the APPT spectral constraints and separability can be analyzed exactly. We study this problem for Bell-diagonal states in two settings: the standard two-qutrit Weyl-Heisenberg basis and the two-ququart lattice basis generated by two-qubit Pauli operators. In the two-qutrit case, we show that a linearized necessary condition for APPT defines a polytope of spectra in which every associated Weyl-Heisenberg Bell-diagonal state admits an exact decomposition into explicitly separable states. This yields a separability criterion that applies to a region even larger than the APPT set itself. In the two-ququart lattice Bell-diagonal setting, we show that a state remains PPT under every permutation of its Bell coefficients if and only if its six largest Bell coefficients sum to at most 1/2, and we prove that all such states are separable. Equivalently, every entangled lattice Bell-diagonal state becomes NPT after a suitable coefficient permutation and is therefore not APPT. The proofs combine convex-polytope analysis, affine and symplectic orbit reductions, and exact rational decompositions into separable states supported on affine Lagrangian subsets. Our results rule out entangled APPT states in both Bell-diagonal families, and provide simple spectral inequalities as sufficient criteria for separability in both cases. Being basis-specific, however, they do not by themselves settle whether APPT and absolute separability coincide.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{patra2026separability,
title = {{On the separability of Bell-diagonal states with absolutely positive partial transposition}},
author = {Ayan Patra and Beatrix C. Hiesmayr},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.12000},
eprint = {2610.12000},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12000},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - On the separability of Bell-diagonal states with absolutely positive partial transposition
AU - Ayan Patra
AU - Beatrix C. Hiesmayr
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.12000
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12000
AB - Absolutely positive partial transpose (APPT) states, which remain PPT under every global unitary, provide a spectral relaxation of absolutely separable states, which remain separable under every such transformation. Despite substantial progress, whether these two notions coincide beyond qubit-qudit systems remains unresolved, motivating the study of structured state families in which the APPT spectral constraints and separability can be analyzed exactly. We study this problem for Bell-diagonal states in two settings: the standard two-qutrit Weyl-Heisenberg basis and the two-ququart lattice basis generated by two-qubit Pauli operators. In the two-qutrit case, we show that a linearized necessary condition for APPT defines a polytope of spectra in which every associated Weyl-Heisenberg Bell-diagonal state admits an exact decomposition into explicitly separable states. This yields a separability criterion that applies to a region even larger than the APPT set itself. In the two-ququart lattice Bell-diagonal setting, we show that a state remains PPT under every permutation of its Bell coefficients if and only if its six largest Bell coefficients sum to at most 1/2, and we prove that all such states are separable. Equivalently, every entangled lattice Bell-diagonal state becomes NPT after a suitable coefficient permutation and is therefore not APPT. The proofs combine convex-polytope analysis, affine and symplectic orbit reductions, and exact rational decompositions into separable states supported on affine Lagrangian subsets. Our results rule out entangled APPT states in both Bell-diagonal families, and provide simple spectral inequalities as sufficient criteria for separability in both cases. Being basis-specific, however, they do not by themselves settle whether APPT and absolute separability coincide.
ER -