Non-Locality Distillation is Impossible for Isotropic Quantum Systems

Abstract

Non-locality is a powerful resource for various communication and information theoretic tasks, e.g., to establish a secret key between two parties, or to reduce the communication complexity of distributed computing. Typically, the more non-local a system is, the more useful it is as a resource for such tasks. We address the issue of non-locality distillation, i.e., whether it is possible to create a strongly non-local system by local operations on several weakly non-local ones. More specifically, we consider a setting where non-local systems can be realized via measurements on underlying shared quantum states. The hardest instances for non-locality distillation are the isotropic quantum systems: if a certain isotropic system can be distilled, then all systems of the same non-locality can be distilled as well. The main result of this paper is that non-locality cannot be distilled from such isotropic quantum systems. Our results are based on the theory of cross norms defined over the tensor product of certain Banach spaces. In particular, we introduce a single-parameter family of cross norms, which is used to construct a hierarchy of convex sets that are closed under local operations. This hierarchy interpolates between the set of local systems and an approximation to the set of quantum systems.