Multipartite Entanglement Evolution Under Separable Operations

Abstract

We study how multi-partite entanglement evolves under the paradigm of separable operations, which include the local operations and classical communication (LOCC) as a special case. We prove that the average "decay" of entanglement induced by a separable operation is measure independent (among SL-invariant ones) and state independent: the ratio between the average output entanglement and the initial entanglement is solely a function of the separable operation, regardless of the input state and of the SL-invariant entanglement measure being used. We discuss the "disentangling power" of a quantum channel and show that it exhibits a similar state invariance as the average entanglement decay ratio. Our Rapid Communication significantly extends the bipartite results of Ref. [1-3] as well as the multi-partite one of Ref. [4], all of the previous work being restricted to one-sided or particular noise models.