Are quantum correlations symmetric ?

Abstract

To our knowledge, all known bipartite entanglement measures are symmetric under exchange of subsystems. We ask if an entanglement measure that is not symmetric can exist. A related question is if there is a state that cannot be swapped by means of LOCC. We show, that in general one cannot swap states by LOCC. This allows to construct nonsymmetric measure of entanglement, and a parameter that reports asymmetry of entanglement contents of quantum state. We propose asymptotic measure of asymmetry of entanglement, and show that states for which it is nonzero, contain necessarily bound entanglement.