The Entanglement Content of Quantum Measurement Bases

Abstract: Bell-state measurements are essential ingredients in many protocols for quantum information processing, ranging from quantum teleportation and dense coding to entanglement distribution in quantum networks. Their power relies on the fact that they are measurements in an entangled basis of a two-particle system and that the used Bell-state basis can be generated from a single Bell state by local unitary transformations. How can these measurements be generalized to more particles? We develop a general framework for this state-to-measurement problem: We introduce a hierarchy of classes of measurement bases, distinguished by the local transformations the parties may use for their generation from a single state. This leads to a generalization of the concept of maximally entangleable (or weighted hypergraph) states and the identification of a novel maximally entangled basis of four qubits, being a candidate for data-hiding tasks or distillation protocols. Finally, we prove that not all forms of entanglement can be encoded in an entire measurement basis.