Entanglement constrained by superselection rules

Abstract

Bipartite entanglement may be reduced if there are restrictions on allowed local operations. We introduce the concept of a generalized superselection rule (SSR) to describe such restrictions, and quantify the entanglement constrained by it. We show that ensemble quantum information processing, where elements in the ensemble are not individually addressable, is subject to the SSR associated with the symmetric group (the group of permutations of elements). We prove that even for an ensemble comprising many pairs of qubits, each pair described by a pure Bell state, the entanglement per element constrained by this SSR goes to zero for a large number of elements.