Testing multipartite entanglement with Hardy's nonlocality

Abstract

Multipartite quantum states may exhibit different types of quantum entanglement in that they cannot be converted into each other by local quantum operations only, and fully understanding mathematical structures of different types of multipartite entanglement is a very challenging task. In this paper, from the viewpoint of Hardy's nonlocality, we compare W and GHZ states and show a couple of crucial different behaviors between them. Particularly, by developing a geometric model for the Hardy's nonlocality problem of W states, we derive an upper bound for its maximal violation probability, which turns out to be strictly smaller than the corresponding probability of GHZ state. This gives us a new comparison between these two quantum states, and the result is also consistent with our intuition that GHZ states is more entangled. Furthermore, we generalize our approach to obtain an asymptotic characterization for general $N$-qubit W states, revealing that when $N$ goes up, the speed that the maximum violation probabilities decay is exponentially slower than that of general $N$-qubit GHZ states. We provide some numerical simulations to verify our theoretical results.