All our former experience with application of quantum theory seems to say that what is predicted by quantum formalism must occur in the laboratory. But the essence of quantum formalism—entanglement, recognized by Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Schrödinger—waited over $70\text{years}$ to enter laboratories as a new resource as real as energy. This holistic property of compound quantum systems, which involves nonclassical correlations between subsystems, has potential for many quantum processes, including canonical ones: quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, and dense coding. However, it appears that this new resource is complex and difficult to detect. Although it is usually fragile to the environment, it is robust against conceptual and mathematical tools, the task of which is to decipher its rich structure. This article reviews basic aspects of entanglement including its characterization, detection, distillation, and quantification. In particular, various manifestations of entanglement via Bell inequalities, entropic inequalities, entanglement witnesses, and quantum cryptography are discussed, and some interrelations are pointed out. The basic role of entanglement in quantum communication within a distant laboratory paradigm is stressed, and some peculiarities such as the irreversibility of entanglement manipulations are also discussed including its extremal form—the bound entanglement phenomenon. The basic role of entanglement witnesses in detection of entanglement is emphasized.

We characterize the set of shared quantum states which contain a cryptographically private key. This allows us to recast the theory of privacy as a paradigm closely related to that used in entanglement manipulation. It is shown that one can distill an arbitrarily secure key from bound entangled states. There are also states that have less distillable private keys than the entanglement cost of the state. In general, the amount of distillable key is bounded from above by the relative entropy of entanglement. Relationships between distillability and distinguishability are found for a class of states which have Bell states correlated to separable hiding states. We also describe a technique for finding states exhibiting irreversibility in entanglement distillation.

We provide a first operational method for checking local indistinguishability of orthogonal states. It originates from that in Ghosh et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 5807 (2001)], though we deal with pure states. Our method shows that probabilistic local distinguishing is possible for a complete multipartite orthogonal basis if and only if all vectors are product. Also, it leads to local indistinguishability of a set of orthogonal pure states of $3\otimes 3$, which shows that one can have more nonlocality with less entanglement, where “more nonlocality” is in the sense of “increased local indistinguishability of orthogonal states.” This is, to our knowledge, the only known example where $d$ orthogonal states in $d\otimes d$ are locally indistinguishable.

In this paper, we develop a formalism for distilling a classical key from a quantum state in a systematic way, expanding on our previous work on a secure key from bound entanglement (Horodecki et al, 2005). More detailed proofs, discussion, and examples are provided of the main results. Namely, we demonstrate that all quantum cryptographic protocols can be recast in a way which looks like entanglement theory, with the only change being that instead of distilling Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs, the parties distill private states. The form of these general private states are given, and we show that there are a number of useful ways of expressing them. Some of the private states can be approximated by certain states, which are bound entangled. Thus, distillable entanglement is not a requirement for a private key. We find that such bound entangled states are useful for a cryptographic primitive we call a controlled private quantum channel (PQC). We also find a general class of states, which have negative partial transpose (are NPT), but which appear to be bound entangled. The relative entropy distance is shown to be an upper bound on the rate of a key. This allows us to compute the exact value of a distillable key for a certain class of private states.

A new paradigm for distributed quantum systems where information is a valuable resource is developed. After finding a unique measure for information, we construct a scheme for its manipulation in analogy with entanglement theory. In this scheme, instead of maximally entangled states, two parties distill local states. We show that, surprisingly, the main tools of entanglement theory are general enough to work in this opposite scheme. Up to plausible assumptions, we show that the amount of information that must be lost during the protocol of concentration of local information can be expressed as the relative entropy distance from some special set of states.

New measures of multipartite entanglement are constructed based on two definitions of multipartite information and different methods of optimizing over extensions of the states. One is a generalization of the squashed entanglement where one takes the mutual information of parties conditioned on the state's extension and takes the infimum over such extensions. Additivity of the multipartite squashed entanglement is proved for both versions of the multipartite information which turn out to be related. The second one is based on taking classical extensions. This scheme is generalized, which enables to construct measures of entanglement based on the mixed convex roof of a quantity, which in contrast to the standard convex roof method involves optimization over all decompositions of a density matrix rather than just the decompositions into pure states. As one of the possible applications of these results we prove that any multipartite monotone is an upper bound on the amount of multipartite distillable key. The findings are finally related to analogous results in classical key agreement.