A nonconvex entanglement monotone determining the characteristic length of entanglement distribution in continuous-variable quantum networks

Abstract

Quantum networks (QNs) promise to enhance the performance of various quantum technologies in the near future by distributing entangled states over long distances. The first step towards this is to develop novel entanglement measures that are both informative and computationally tractable at large scales. While numerous such entanglement measures exist for discrete-variable (DV) systems, a comprehensive exploration for experimentally preferred continuous-variable (CV) systems is lacking. Here, we introduce a class of CV entanglement measures, among which we identify a nonconvex entanglement monotone -- the ratio negativity, which possesses a simple, scalable form that determines the exponential decay of optimal entanglement swapping on a chain of pure Gaussian states. This characterization opens avenues for leveraging statistical physics tools to analyze swapping-protocol-based CV QNs.