Entanglement of three-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-symmetric states

TL;DR

This paper provides a complete characterization of entanglement in three-qubit GHZ-symmetric states, extending understanding of multipartite entanglement and offering tools for entanglement detection.

Contribution

It introduces a full description of entanglement in three-qubit GHZ-symmetric states and develops a symmetrization witness for classifying three-qubit entanglement.

Findings

Complete entanglement characterization for three-qubit GHZ-symmetric states

Parameterization method based on state invariance under local operations

Development of a symmetrization witness for entanglement classification

Abstract

The first characterization of mixed-state entanglement was achieved for two-qubit states in Werner's seminal work [Phys. Rev. A 40, 4277 (1989)]. A physically important extension of this result concerns mixtures of a pure entangled state (such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger [GHZ] state) and the completely unpolarized state. These mixed states serve as benchmark for the robustness of entanglement. They share the same symmetries as the GHZ state. We call such states GHZ-symmetric. Despite significant progress their multipartite entanglement properties have remained an open problem. Here we give a complete description of the entanglement in the family of three-qubit GHZ-symmetric states and, in particular, of the three-qubit generalized Werner states. Our method relies on the appropriate parameterization of the states and on the invariance of entanglement properties under general local operations. An immediate application of our results is the definition of a symmetrization witness for the entanglement class of arbitrary three-qubit states.