New Partial Trace Inequalities and Distillability of Werner States

Abstract

One of the oldest problems in quantum information theory is to study if there exists a state with negative partial transpose which is undistillable. This problem has been open for almost 30 years, and still no one has been able to give a complete answer to it. This work presents a new strategy to try to solve this problem by translating the distillability condition on the family of Werner states into a problem of partial trace inequalities, this is the aim of our first main result. As a consequence we obtain a new bound for the $2$-distillability of Werner states, which does not depend on the dimension of the system. On the other hand, our second main result provides new partial trace inequalities for bipartite systems, connecting some of them also with the separability of Werner states. Throughout this work we also present numerous partial trace inequalities, which are valid for many families of matrices.