Standard forms and entanglement engineering of multimode Gaussian states under local operations

We investigate the action of local unitary operations on multimode (pure or mixed) Gaussian states and single out the minimal number of locally invariant parameters which completely characterize the covariance matrix of such states. For pure Gaussian states, central resources for continuous-variable quantum information, we investigate separately the parameter reduction due to the additional constraint of global purity, and the one following by the local-unitary freedom. Counting arguments and insights from the phase-space Schmidt decomposition and in general from the framework of symplectic analysis, accompany our description of the standard form of pure n-mode Gaussian states. In particular, we clarify why only in pure states with n <= 3 modes all the direct correlations between position and momentum operators can be set to zero by local unitary operations. For any n, the emerging minimal set of parameters contains complete information about all forms of entanglement in the corresponding states. An efficient state engineering scheme (able to encode direct correlations between position and momentum operators as well) is proposed to produce entangled multimode Gaussian resources, its number of optical elements matching the minimal number of locally invariant degrees of freedom of general pure n-mode Gaussian states. Finally, we demonstrate that so-called 'block-diagonal' Gaussian states, without direct correlations between position and momentum, are systematically less entangled, on average, than arbitrary pure Gaussian states.