Local commutativity versus Bell inequality violation for entangled states and versus non-violation for separable states

Abstract

By introducing a quantitative `degree of commutativity' in terms of the angle between spin-observables we present two tight quantitative trade-off relations in the case of two qubits: First, for entangled states, between the degree of commutativity of local observables and the maximal amount of violation of the Bell inequality: if both local angles increase from zero to \pi/2 (i.e., the degree of local commutativity decreases), the maximum violation of the Bell inequality increases. Secondly, a converse trade-off relation holds for separable states: if both local angles approach \pi/2 the maximal value obtainable for the correlations in the Bell inequality decreases and thus the non-violation increases. As expected, the extremes of these relations are found in the case of anti-commuting local observables where respectively the bounds of 2\sqrt{2} and \sqrt{2} hold for the expectation of the Bell operator. The trade-off relations show that non-commmutativity gives ``a more than classical result" for entangled states, whereas "a less than classical result" is obtained for separable states. The experimental relevance of the trade-off relation for separable states is that it provides an experimental test for two qubit entanglement. Its advantages are twofold: in comparison to violations of Bell inequalities it is a stronger criterion and in comparison to entanglement witnesses it needs to make less strong assumptions about the observables implemented in the experiment.