Negativity vs. purity and entropy in witnessing entanglement

In this paper, we explore the value of measures of mixedness in witnessing entanglement. While all measures of mixedness may be used to witness entanglement, we show that all such entangled states must have a negative partial transpose (NPT). Where the experimental resources needed to determine this negativity scale poorly at high dimension, we compare different measures of mixedness over both Haar-uniform and uniform-purity ensembles of joint quantum states at varying dimension to gauge their relative success at witnessing entanglement. In doing so, we find that comparing joint and marginal purities is overwhelmingly (albeit not exclusively) more successful at identifying entanglement than comparing joint and marginal von Neumann entropies, in spite of requiring fewer resources. We conclude by showing how our results impact the fundamental relationship between correlation and entanglement and related witnesses.