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Abstract

We explore entanglement as a resource to distinguish locally indistinguishable orthogonal quantum states. Specifically, we consider sets which contain states from an unextendible product basis along with a pure entangled state. We establish a connection between the aforesaid problem and the entanglement-assisted discrimination of a certain class of many-copy indistinguishable sets. The entanglement-assisted protocols that we construct here are quite efficient, as they render the teleportation-based protocols sub-optimal. In fact, a central aspect of our study is to explore the role of Schmidt rank as a resource to distinguish the states of locally indistinguishable sets. Interestingly, we identify an instance where a set of locally indistinguishable orthogonal states remains locally indistinguishable even with access to any finite number of copies, yet becomes perfectly distinguishable using entangled resources of relatively low cost. This fact makes it possible to compare the degrees of local indistinguishability associated with several locally indistinguishable sets within the same Hilbert space. Consequently, we report a hierarchy of local indistinguishability among the many-copy indistinguishable sets. Thereafter, based on our analysis, we present a theoretical proposal for an information processing protocol exhibiting secure locking of information and its resource-efficient extraction. Furthermore, we also find that the hierarchical difference in local indistinguishability can increase with increasing dimension of the Hilbert space.