Necessary and sufficient criterion for k-separability of N-qubit noisy GHZ states

Abstract

A Multipartite entangled state has many different kinds of entanglements specified by the number of partitions. The most essential example of multipartite entanglement is the entanglement of multi-qubit Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state in white noise. We explicitly construct the entanglement witnesses for these states with stabilizer generators of the GHZ states. For an [Formula: see text] qubit GHZ state in white noise, we demonstrate the necessary and sufficient criterion of separability when it is divided into [Formula: see text] parties with [Formula: see text] for arbitrary [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. The criterion covers more than a half of all kinds of partial entanglements for [Formula: see text]-qubit GHZ states in white noise. For the rest of multipartite entanglement problems, we present a method to obtain the sufficient conditions of separability. As an application, we consider [Formula: see text] qubit GHZ state as a codeword of the degenerate quantum code passing through depolarizing channel. We find that the output state is neither genuinely entangled nor fully separable when the quantum channel capacity reduces from positive to zero.