Practical methods for witnessing genuine multi-qubit entanglement in the vicinity of symmetric states

Abstract

We present general numerical methods to construct witness operators for entanglement detection and estimation of the fidelity. Our methods are applied to detecting entanglement in the vicinity of a six-qubit Dicke state with three excitations and also to further entangled symmetric states. All our witnesses are designed to keep the measurement effort small. We present also general results on the efficient local decomposition of permutationally invariant operators, which makes it possible to measure projectors to symmetric states efficiently