Unextendible product bases and locally unconvertible bound entangled states

Abstract

Mutual convertibility of bound entangled states under local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC) is studied. We focus on states associated with unextendible product bases (UPB) in a system of three qubits. A complete classification of such UPBs is suggested. We prove that for any pair of UPBs $S$ and $T$ the associated bound entangled states $ρ_S$ and $ρ_T$ can not be converted to each other by LOCC, unless $S$ and $T$ coincide up to local unitaries. More specifically, there exists a finite precision $ε>0$ such that for any LOCC protocol mapping $ρ_S$ into a probabilistic ensemble $(p_j,ρ_j)$, the fidelity between $ρ_T$ and any possible final state $ρ_j$ is smaller than $1-ε$.