Shared purity of multipartite quantum states

Abstract

Fidelity plays an important role in measuring distances between pairs of quantum states, of single as well as multiparty systems. Based on the concept of fidelity, we introduce a physical quantity, shared purity, for arbitrary pure or mixed quantum states of shared systems of an arbitrary number of parties in arbitrary dimensions. We find that although it detects a quantum feature of the shared state, it is different from quantum correlations. We prove that a maximal shared purity between two parties excludes any shared purity of these parties with a third party, thus ensuring its quantum nature. Moreover, we show that all generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states are monogamous, while all generalized W states are nonmonogamous with respect to this measure. We apply the quantity to investigate the quantum XY spin-1/2 models and observe that it can faithfully detect the quantum phase transition present in these models. We perform a finite-size scaling analysis and find the scaling exponent for this quantity.