Quantum state merging with bound entanglement

Abstract

Quantum state merging is one of the most important protocols in quantum information theory. In this task two parties aim to merge their parts of a pure tripartite state by making use of additional singlets while preserving correlations with a third party. We study a variation of this scenario where the shared state is not necessarily pure, and the merging parties have free access to local operations, classical communication, and positive partial transpose (PPT) entangled states. We provide general conditions for a state to admit perfect merging, and present a family of fully separable states which cannot be perfectly merged if the merging parties have no access to additional singlets. We also show that free PPT entangled states do not give any advantage for merging of pure states, and the conditional entropy plays the same role as in standard quantum state merging quantifying the rate of additional singlets needed to perfectly merge the state.