The Set of Separable States has no Finite Semidefinite Representation Except in Dimension $$3\times 2$$

Given integers $$n \ge m$$ n ≥ m , let $$\text {Sep}(n,m)$$ Sep ( n , m ) be the set of separable states on the Hilbert space $$\mathbb {C}^n \otimes \mathbb {C}^m$$ C n ⊗ C m . It is well-known that for $$(n,m)=(3,2)$$ ( n , m ) = ( 3 , 2 ) the set of separable states has a simple description using semidefinite programming: it is given by the set of states that have a positive partial transpose. In this paper we show that for larger values of n and m the set $$\text {Sep}(n,m)$$ Sep ( n , m ) has no semidefinite programming description of finite size. As $$\text {Sep}(n,m)$$ Sep ( n , m ) is a semialgebraic set this provides a new counterexample to the Helton–Nie conjecture, which was recently disproved by Scheiderer in a breakthrough result. Compared to Scheiderer’s approach, our proof is elementary and relies only on basic results about semialgebraic sets and functions.