Optimal entanglement witnesses from limited local measurements

We address the problem of optimizing entanglement witnesses when a limited fixed set of local measurements can be performed on a bipartite system, thus providing a procedure, feasible also for experiments, to detect entangled states using only the statistics of these local measurements. We completely characterize the class of entanglement witnesses of the form W=PΓ, where Γ denotes partial transposition, that can be constructed from the measurements of the bipartite operators σx - σx, σy - σy, and σz - σz in the case of two-qubit systems. In particular, we consider all possible extremal decomposable witnesses within the considered class that can be defined from this set of measurements. Finally, we discuss possible extensions to higher-dimension bipartite systems when the set of available measurements is characterized by the generalized Gell-Mann matrices. We provide several examples of entanglement witnesses, both decomposable and indecomposable, that can be constructed with these limited resources.