Entanglement in pure and thermal cluster states

Abstract

We present a closest separable state to cluster states. We start by considering linear cluster chains and extend our method to cluster states that can be used as a universal resource in quantum computation. We reproduce known results for pure cluster states and show how our method can be used in quantifying entanglement in noisy cluster states. Operational meaning is given to our method that clearly demonstrates how these closest separable states can be constructed from two-qubit clusters in the case of pure states. We also discuss the issue of finding the critical temperature at which the cluster state becomes only classically correlated and the importance of this temperature to our method.