The entangling and disentangling power of unitary transformations are unequal

Abstract

We consider two capacity quantities associated with bipartite unitary gates: the entangling and the disentangling power. For two-qubit unitaries these two capacities are always the same. Here we prove that these capacities are different in general. We do so by constructing an explicit example of a qubit-qutrit unitary whose entangling power is maximal (2 ebits), but whose disentangling power is strictly less. A corollary is that there can be no unique ordering for unitary gates in terms of their ability to perform non-local tasks. Finally we show that in large dimensions, almost all bipartite unitaries have entangling and disentangling capacities close to the maximal possible (and thus in high dimensions the difference in these capacities is small for almost all unitaries).