Separability in terms of a single entanglement witness

Abstract

The separability problem is formulated in terms of a characterization of a single entanglement witness. More specifically, we show that any (in general multipartite) state \varrho is separable if and only if a specially constructed entanglement witness W_{\varrho} is weakly optimal, i.e., its expectation value vanishes on at least one product vector. Interestingly, the witness can always be chosen to be decomposable. Our result changes the conceptual aspect of the separability problem and rises some questions about properties of positive maps.