Relaxations of separability in multipartite systems: Semidefinite programs, witnesses and volumes

© 2015 IOP Publishing Ltd. While entanglement is believed to be an important ingredient in the understanding of quantum many-body physics, the complexity of its characterization scales very unfavorably with the size of the system. Finding super-sets of the set of separable states that admit a simpler description has proven to be a fruitful approach in the bipartite setting. In this paper we discuss a systematic way of characterizing multiparticle entanglement via various relaxations. We furthermore describe an operational witness construction arising from such relaxations that is capable of detecting every entangled state. Finally, we also derive an analytic upper-bound on the volume of biseparable states and show that the volume of the states with a positive partial transpose for any split that rapidly outgrows this volume. This proves that simple semi-definite relaxations in the multiparticle case cannot be an equally good approximation for any scenario.