Generation of quadripartite entanglement from cascaded four-wave-mixing processes

Abstract

We show that the scheme of cascaded four-wave-mixing (FWM) processes can be a promising alternative method for generating quadripartite entanglement. This scheme utilizes the strongly entangled twin beams produced by a FWM process as seed beams for another two FWM processes. To present the entanglement properties of this scheme, we verify that the generated state is a $\mathcal{H}$-graph state by using the graphical calculus for Gaussian pure states at first. Then we proceed with investigating the possibility of this scheme for generating quadripartite entanglement by applying the positivity under partial transposition criterion. It is verified that quadripartite entanglement exists for the whole gain region in this scheme. In addition, the possibilities of generating bipartite and tripartite entanglement are studied as well to reveal the entanglement structure. Our results pave the way to experimentally generate quadripartite entanglement based on cascaded FWM processes.