Investigating bound entangled two-qutrit states via the best separable approximation

Abstract

We use the linear programming algorithm introduced by Akulin et al. to perform best separable approximation on two-qutrit random density matrices. We combine the numerical results with theoretical methods in order to generate random representative families of positive partial transposed bound entangled (BE) states and analyze their properties. Our results disclose that for the two-qutrit system the BE states have negligible volume and that these form tiny ‘islands’ sporadically distributed over the surface of the polytope of separable states. The detected families of BE states are found to be located under a layer of pseudo one-copy undistillable negative partial transposed states with the latter covering the vast majority of the surface of the separable polytope.