Entanglement cost of quantum depolarization

Abstract

Entanglement cost is the asymptotic rate of Bell pairs required to prepare a quantum state. Its regularized definition has made exact evaluation difficult, even for isotropic states (i.e., depolarized maximally entangled states). In this work, we determine the entanglement cost of every qubit isotropic state and, more generally, every two-qubit Bell-diagonal state. Our proof uses a family of suitably tuned qubit semigroups to transform a general log-Sobolev entropy bound into supporting lines of Wootters'function. A recent exact tensorization theorem of Dong et al. [arXiv:2606.17729] extends these bounds to arbitrarily many copies, yielding a general lower bound on entanglement cost. Matching this bound with the entanglement of formation also determines the exact cost for a broader class of two-qubit states. For qudit isotropic states, we derive another general lower bound from the full depolarizing $2\to 3$ norm. This bound substantially improves on the PPT-relative entropy of entanglement and nearly matches the entanglement of formation, leaving a gap of at most $2\%$ of $\log d$ that vanishes as $d$ grows. Finally, the exact qubit results and qudit bounds extend to the entanglement cost of preparing quantum depolarizing channels under both parallel and sequential strategies.