Pedagogical introduction to the entropy of entanglement for Gaussian states

Abstract

The most useful measure of a bipartite entanglement is the von Neumann entropy of either of the reduced density matrices. For a particular class of continuous-variable states, the Gaussian states, the entropy of entanglement can be expressed rather elegantly in terms of the symplectic eigenvalues, elements that characterize a Gaussian state and depend on the correlations of the canonical variables. We give a pedagogical step-by-step derivation of this result and provide some insights that can be useful in practical calculations.