Entanglement of flower states

The mysterious nature of entanglement, one of the most prominent exquisitely quantum phenomena, is reflected in its intricate operational structure, with a hierarchy of classes of free operations that enable its manipulation at different levels of effectiveness. Here we use the class of 'flower states', parametrised by their (even) local dimension 2k, to shine light on some aspects of this varied landscape. We compute all the main entanglement measures for flower states, uncovering a large gap between all forms of distillable entanglement, equal to 1 ebit independently of the local dimension, and the entanglement cost under local operations and classical communication (LOCC), known to be equal to logbig\(2sqrt{k}big\). Even under the strictly more powerful class of non-entangling (NE) operations, we show that their cost is still equal to logbig\(1+sqrt{k}big\), only about an ebit less than for LOCCs. This result, which we prove by calculating the recently introduced tempered entanglement negativity for these states, demonstrates the largest known 'irreversibility gap', i.e. the difference between distillable entanglement and entanglement cost, under NE operations, equal to Thetabig\(frac12 log dbig\), with d being the local dimension. A notable consequence is that the celebrated squashed entanglement is not a monotone under NE operations. Finally, we compute the exact cost under LOCC operations for flower states; this is given by the Schmidt number, which turns out to be additive over multiple copies and equal to min_r|k logleft\(r + frac{k}{r} right\); for prime k this reduces to log(k+1), about twice the standard LOCC cost. These last results leverage the uncertainty relations over cyclic groups proved by Tao and Meshulam.