We suggest a formalism to illustrate the entanglement of identical particles in the first quantization language (1QL). Our 1QL formalism enables one to exploit all the well-established quantum information tools to understand the indistinguishable ones, including the reduced density matrix and familiar entanglement measures. The rigorous quantitative relation between the amount of entanglement and the spatial coherence of particles is possible in this formalism. Our entanglement detection process is a generalization of the entanglement extraction protocol for identical particles with mode splitting proposed by Killoran et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 150501 (2014)].

• Received 6 March 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.052345