Maximally-Disordered Distillable Quantum States

Abstract

We explore classical to quantum transition of correlations by studying the quantum states located just outside of the classically-correlated-states-only neighborhood of the maximally mixed state (the largest separable ball (LSB)). We show that a natural candidate for such states raises the possibility of a layered transition, i.e., an annular region comprising only classical and the classical-like bound entangled states, followed by free or distillable entanglement. Surprisingly, we find the transition to be abrupt for bipartite systems: distillable states emerge arbitrarily close to the LSB. For multipartite systems, while the radius of the LSB remains unknown, we determine the radius of the largest undistillable ball. Our results also provide an upper bound on how noisy shared entangled states can be for executing quantum information processing protocols.