Operational multipartite entanglement classes for symmetric photonic qubit states

Abstract

We present experimental schemes that allow to study the entanglement classes of all symmetric states in multiqubit photonic systems. In addition to comparing the presented schemes in efficiency, we will highlight the relation between the entanglement properties of symmetric Dicke states and a recently proposed entanglement scheme for atoms. In analogy to the latter, we obtain a one-to-one correspondence between well-defined sets of experimental parameters and multiqubit entanglement classes inside the symmetric subspace of the photonic system.