A Minimum-Cardinality Genuinely Unextendible Product Basis in Three Qutrits

Abstract

It has remained an open question whether a genuinely unextendible product basis (GUPB) exists. We resolve this problem by constructing an explicit three-qutrit GUPB of cardinality fourteen in the smallest tripartite Hilbert space in which a GUPB can exist. Together with the nonexistence of three-qutrit GUPBs of cardinality less than fourteen, our construction proves that fourteen is the minimum cardinality. A padding procedure further extends the construction to all tripartite systems whose local dimensions are at least three. As applications, the normalized projector onto the thirteen-dimensional orthogonal complement of the three-qutrit GUPB is positive under partial transposition and bound entangled across every bipartition, while the GUPB exhibits strong quantum nonlocality without entanglement.