We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state ρ shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this “work deficit” and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. In particuar, for pure states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of...

We present a simple quantum network, based on the controlled-SWAP gate, that can extract certain properties of quantum states without recourse to quantum tomography. It can be used as a basic building block for direct quantum estimations of both linear and nonlinear functionals of any density operator. The network has many potential applications ranging from purity tests and eigenvalue estimations to direct characterization of...

Basing on positive maps separability criterion we propose the experimentally viable, direct detection of quantum entanglement. It is efficient and does not require any a priori knowledge about the state. For two qubits it provides a sharp (i.e., “if and only if”) separability test and estimation of amount of entanglement. We view this method as a new form of quantum computation, namely, as a decision problem with quantum data structure.