Majorization theoretical approach to entanglement enhancement via local filtration

From the perspective of majorization theory, we study how to enhance the entanglement of a two-mode squeezed vacuum (TMSV) state by using local filtration operations. We present several schemes achieving entanglement enhancement with photon addition and subtraction, and then consider filtration as a general probabilistic procedure consisting in acting with local (nonunitary) operators on each mode. From this, we identify a sufficient set of two conditions for these filtration operators to successfully enhance the entanglement of a TMSV state, namely, the operators must be Fock orthogonal (i.e., preserving the orthogonality of Fock states) and Fock amplifying (i.e., giving larger amplitudes to larger Fock states). Our results notably prove that ideal photon addition, subtraction, and any concatenation thereof always enhance the entanglement of a TMSV state in the sense of majorization theory. We further investigate the case of realistic photon addition (subtraction) and are able to upper bound the distance between a realistic photon-added (-subtracted) TMSV state and a nearby state that is provably more entangled than the TMSV, thus extending entanglement enhancement to practical schemes via the use of a notion of approximate majorization. Finally, we consider the state resulting from k-photon addition (on each of the two modes) on a TMSV state. We prove analytically that the state corresponding to k=1 majorizes any state corresponding to 2≤k≤8 and we conjecture the validity of the statement for all k≥9.