Multipartite Entanglement Certification, With or Without Tomography

Certifying multipartite entanglement is a fundamental task. Since n-qubit state is parameterized by 4ⁿ - 1 real numbers, it is interesting to design a measurement setup that detects multipartite entanglement with as little effort as possible, and at a minimum without fully revealing the whole information of the state, the so-called “tomography”. In this paper, we study the relationship between multipartite entanglement certification and tomography, with the constraint that only single-copy measurements are allowed. We show that by using nonadaptive single-copy measurements, universal entanglement detection, among all states, can not be accomplished without full state tomography. Moreover, we show that almost all multipartite correlations, including the genuine entanglement and the entanglement depth, require full state tomography to detect in this measurement setting. We also observe that universal entanglement detection, among pure states, can be accomplished using much fewer measurements than full state tomography even using only local measurements.