Entangled two-mode Gaussian states are a key resource for quantum information technologies such as teleportation, quantum cryptography, and quantum computation, so quantification of Gaussian entanglement is an important problem. Entanglement of formation is unanimously considered a proper measure of quantum correlations, but for arbitrary two-mode Gaussian states no analytical form is currently known. In contrast, logarithmic negativity is a measure that is straightforward to calculate and so has been adopted by most researchers, even though it is a less faithful quantifier. In this work, we derive an analytical lower bound for entanglement of formation of generic two-mode Gaussian states, which becomes tight for symmetric states and for states with balanced correlations. We define simple expressions for entanglement of formation in physically relevant situations and use these to illustrate the problematic behavior of logarithmic negativity, which can lead to spurious conclusions.

Gaussian channels are the typical way to model the decoherence introduced by the environment in continuous-variable quantum states. It is known that those channels can be simulated by a teleportation protocol using as a resource state either a maximally entangled state passing through the same channel, i.e., the Choi-state, or a state that is entangled at least as much as the Choistate. Since the construction of the Choi-state requires infinite mean energy and entanglement, i.e. it is unphysical, we derive instead every physical state able to simulate a given channel through teleportation with finite resources, and we further find the optimal ones, i.e., the resource states that require the minimum energy and entanglement. We show that the optimal resource states are pure and equally entangled to the Choi-state as measured by the entanglement of formation. We also show that the same amount of entanglement is enough to simulate an equally decohering channel, while even more entanglement can simulate less decohering channels. We, finally, use that fact to generalize a previously known error correction protocol by making it able to correct noise coming not only from pure loss but from thermal loss channels as well.arXiv:1803.03516v2 [quant-ph] 1 Jul 2018

Entanglement of formation quantifies the entanglement of a state in terms of the entropy of entanglement of the least entangled pure state needed to prepare it. An analytical expression for this measure exists only for special cases, and finding a closed formula for an arbitrary state still remains an open problem. In this work we focus on two-mode Gaussian states, and we derive narrow upper and lower bounds for the measure that get tight for several special cases. Further, we show that the problem of calculating the actual value of the entanglement of formation for arbitrary two-mode Gaussian states reduces to a trivial single parameter optimization process, and we provide an efficient algorithm for the numerical calculation of the measure.