Special features of the Weyl–Heisenberg Bell basis imply unusual entanglement structure of Bell-diagonal states

Abstract

Abstract Bell states are of crucial importance for entanglement based methods in quantum information science. Typically, a standard construction of a complete orthonormal Bell-basis by Weyl–Heisenberg operators is considered. We show that the group structure of these operators has strong implication on error correction schemes and on the entanglement structure within Bell-diagonal states. In particular, it implies an equivalence between a Pauli channel and a twirl channel. Interestingly, other complete orthonormal Bell-bases do break the equivalence and lead to a completely different entanglement structure, for instance in the share of positive partial transposition (PPT)-entangled states. In detail, we find that the standard Bell basis has the highest observed share on PPT-states and PPT-entangled states compared to other Bell bases. In summary, our findings show that the standard Bell basis construction exploits a very special structure with strong implications to quantum information theoretic protocols if a deviation is considered.