Checking the optimality of entanglement witnesses: an application to structural physical approximations

Abstract

In 2008, the conjecture that structural physical approximations (SPAs) to optimal entanglement witnesses are separable states (in general unnormalized) was posed. In an attempt to disprove it, Ha and Kye (2012 arXiv: 1210.1088v3) proposed a decomposable entanglement witness, whose SPA is entangled, and argued that it is optimal. In this paper, which is based on a comment to the latter work (Augusiak et al 2013 arXiv: 1304.2040v1), we show, both analytically and numerically, that this entanglement witness is not optimal, and as such it is not a counterexample to the conjecture. To this end, we make use of a method for checking the optimality of entanglement witnesses developed already in Lewenstein et al (2000 Phys. Rev. A 62 052310), however, hardly exploited so far in the literature.