The entanglement of purification is not additive

Abstract:The entanglement of purification $E_P$, introduced by Terhal, Horodecki, Leung, and DiVincenzo in 2002, measures the total correlations of a bipartite state by the entanglement needed to purify it; whether it is additive on tensor powers has been open since its introduction. In 2012 Chen and Winter argued "beyond reasonable doubt", from numerical evidence, that the two-qubit Werner state at singlet fraction $f = 1/200$ is a counterexample, and explicitly left a completely rigorous proof to future work. To our knowledge we give the first rigorous proof: for this state $W$, $E_P^\infty(W) \le 0.9663\ldots < 97/100 < E_P(W)$, hence the entanglement of purification is strictly nonadditive at some finite tensor power. The lower bound is a finite certificate: analytic reductions send the Schmidt spectrum of every purification in the complete complex Stiefel domain to a point satisfying explicit necessary inequalities in a three-dimensional box, and an exact-rational subdivision of that box has 25,383 leaves, each of which either excludes nonphysical points or proves the entropy bound. The upper bound combines an exact symmetric-support endpoint, an explicit feasible isometry, and a convexity theorem for the regularized quantity, closed by two directed rational logarithm certificates. Every computer-assisted certificate reduces to integer comparisons; a dependency-free program verifies all of them from the supplementary artifact.

24 pages; verification artifact archived at doi:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22097511

arXiv:2609.29539 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2609.29539v1 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.29539 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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