Not all entangled states are useful for ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography

Abstract: It is well known that one can extract all the information of an unknown quantum channel by means of quantum process tomography, such as standard quantum-process tomography and ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography (AAQPT). Furthermore, it has been shown that entanglement is not necessary for AAQPT, there exist separable states which are also useful for it. Surprisingly, in this work we find that not all entangled states are useful for AAQPT, there also exist some entangled states which are useless. The realignment operation used in entanglement detection can be related to the question whether a bipartite state is useful for AAQPT. We derive the relationship between them and show the process of extracting the complete information of an unknown channel by the realignment operation. Based on this relationship, we present examples of a two-qutrit entangled state and a two-qutrit bound entangled state. Both of these two examples are entangled but they cannot be used for AAQPT. Last but not least, experimental verification has also been performed on the IBM platform.