Characterizing entanglement sources

Abstract

We discuss how to characterize entanglement sources with finite sets of measurements. The measurements do not have to be tomographically complete and may consist of POVMs rather than von Neumann measurements. Our method yields a probability that the source generates an entangled state as well as estimates of any desired calculable entanglement measures, including their error bars. We apply two criteria, namely, Akaike's information criterion and the Bayesian information criterion, to compare and assess different models (with different numbers of parameters) describing entanglement-generating devices. We discuss differences between standard entanglement-verification methods and our present method of characterizing an entanglement source.