Genuine multipartite entanglement in noisy quantum networks highly depends on the topology

Patricia Contreras-Tejada, Carlos Palazuelos, Julio I. de Vicente

Published 2021-06-08Version 1

Quantum networks are under current active investigation for the implementation of quantum communication tasks. With this motivation in mind, we study the entanglement properties of the multipartite states underlying these networks. We show that, in sharp contrast to the case of pure states, genuine multipartite entanglement is severely affected by the presence of noise depending on the network topology: the amount of connectivity determines whether genuine multipartite entanglement is robust for any system size or whether it is completely washed out under the slightest form of noise for a sufficiently large number of parties. The impossibility to obtain genuine multipartite entanglement in some networks implies some fundamental limitations for their applications. In addition, the family of states considered in this work proves very useful to find new examples of states with interesting properties. We show this by constructing states of any number of parties that display superactivation of genuine multipartite nonlocality.