Beyond Gaussian Entanglement: Practical Criteria for Polynomially Excited Quantum States
Polynomial excitations consisting of creation and annihilation operators are studied. Subsystem entanglement is proven produced and preserved by such manipulations. NPT entanglement already present between any two subsystems of a general pure or mixed multipartite Gaussian state is preserved under all polynomial excitations. Nevertheless, these excitations can create NPT entanglement between initially separable subsystems, implying that the number of NPT entangled pairs cannot decrease. Polynomial excitations of a wide class of initially separable pure states are considered. For these states, the method reduces the infinite-dimensional positivity problem to a finite-dimensional one: after partial transposition, NPT entanglement is equivalent to a corresponding bilinear representation matrix not being positive semi-definite. Furthermore, using symplectic diagonalization and spectral decomposition, an explicit transformation is constructed between the Fock-space and position representations. It is applied to quadratic excitations of a three-mode mixed Gaussian state. The behavior of the NPT entanglement is tracked between subsystems as a function of a parameter $κ$, which tunes the non-locality of the excitation, and quantum negativity is evaluated. Under a chosen quadratic Hamiltonian, the resulting unitary time evolution maintains NPT entanglement for long intervals, interrupted only by short periods of PPT states. Finally, a closed analytical expression is derived for the covariance matrix of a general quadratic operator for an arbitrary number of degrees of freedom in phase space. Our framework directly connects mathematical foundations, theoretical modeling, and experimentally feasible implementations.