Completable sets of orthogonal product states with minimal nonlocality

Since the theory of quantum nonlocality without entanglement was proposed, great achievements have been made in the local distinguishability of bipartite orthogonal quantum states, but there are still many unresolved problems. In this paper, we first propose the concept of minimal nonlocality to characterize the lower bound of the amount of the elements contained in a nonlocal set of orthogonal product states. A nonlocal set of orthogonal product states has minimal nonlocality if and only if the set can be distinguished by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) after only a certain state of the set is removed. Then we give a novel method to construct completable sets with minimal nonlocality in bipartite quantum system. Compared with the existing results, the completable sets we construct have the least number of elements in the same quantum systems. Finally, we extend our construction method of completable nonlocal set with fewer elements in bipartite system to tripartite or even more multipartite quantum systems.& COPY; 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.