Detecting entanglement of quantum channels

Entanglement is the crucial resource for different quantum information processing tasks. While conventional studies focus on the entanglement of bipartite or multipartite quantum states, recent works have extended the scenario to the entanglement of quantum channels, an operational quantification of the channel entanglement manipulation capability. Based on the recently proposed channel entanglement resource framework, here we study a further task of resource detection—witnessing entanglement of quantum channels. We first introduce the general framework and show how channel entanglement detection is related to the Choi state of the channel, enabling channel entanglement detection via conventional state entanglement detection methods. We also consider entanglement of multipartite quantum channels and use the stabilizer formalism to construct entanglement witnesses for circuits consisting of controlled-Z gates. We study the effectiveness of the proposed detection methods and compare their performance for several typical channels. Our work paves the way for systematic theoretical studies of channel entanglement and practical benchmarking of noisy intermediate scaled quantum devices.