Describing mixed spin-space entanglement of pure states of indistinguishable particles using an occupation-number basis

Quantum-mechanical entanglement is essential for certain forms of quantum communication, and occurs as a consequence of some operations in quantum computation. The ability to quantify this resource correctly has thus become of great interest to those working in the field of quantum information theory. In this paper, we show that all existing entanglement measures but one fail important tests of fitness when applied to n-particle m-site states of indistinguishable particles, where n, m>~2. The accepted method of measuring the entanglement of a bipartite system of distinguishable particles is to use the von Neumann entropy of the reduced density matrix of one half of the system. We show that expressing the full density matrix using a site-spin occupation number basis, and reducing with respect to that basis, gives an entanglement that meets all currently known fitness criteria for systems composed of either distinguishable or indistinguishable particles. We consider an output state from a previously published thought experiment, a state that is entangled in both spin and spatial degrees of freedom, and show that the site entropy measure gives the correct total entanglement. We also show how the spin-space entanglement transfer occurring within the apparatus can be understood in terms of the transfer of probability from single-occupancy to double-occupancy sectors of the density matrix.