Universal state inversion and concurrence in arbitrary dimensions

Wootters Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2245 (1998) has given an explicit formula for the entanglement of formation of two qubits in terms of what he calls the concurrence of the joint density operator. Wootters's concurrence is defined with the help of the superoperator that flips the spin of a qubit. We generalize the spin-flip superoperator to a ``universal inverter, '' which acts on quantum systems of arbitrary dimension, and we introduce the corresponding generalized concurrence for joint pure states of D₁D₂ bipartite quantum systems. We call this generalized concurrence the I concurrence to emphasize its relation to the universal inverter. The universal inverter, which is a positive, but not completely positive superoperator, is closely related to the completely positive universal-NOT superoperator, the quantum analogue of a classical NOT gate. We present a physical realization of the universal-NOT superoperator.