State space structure and entanglement of rotationally invariant spin systems
Heinz‐Peter Breuer · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General · 2005
We investigate the structure of SO (3)-invariant quantum systems which are composed of two particles with spins j 1 and j 2 . The states of the composite spin system are represented by means of two complete sets of rotationally invariant operators, namely by the projections P J onto the eigenspaces of the total angular momentum J , and by certain invariant operators Q K which are built out of spherical tensor operators of rank K . It is shown that these representations are connected by an orthogonal matrix whose elements are expressible in terms of Wigner's 6- j symbols. The operation of the partial time reversal of the combined spin system is demonstrated to be diagonal in the Q K -representation. These results are employed to obtain a complete characterization of spin systems with j 1 = 1 and arbitrary j 2 ⩾ 1. We prove that the Peres–Horodecki criterion of positive partial transposition (PPT) is necessary and sufficient for separability if j 2 is an integer, while for half-integer spins j 2 there always exist entangled PPT states (bound entanglement). We construct an optimal entanglement witness for the case of half-integer spins and design a protocol for the detection of entangled PPT states through measurements of the total angular momentum.