Optimal Detection of Entanglement in GHZ States

Abstract

We present a broad class of states which are diagonal in the basis of N-qubit GHZ states such that non-positivity under the partial transpose operation is necessary and sufficient for the presence of entanglement. This class includes many naturally arising instances such as dephased or depolarised GHZ states. Furthermore, our proof directly leads to an entanglement witness which saturates this bound. The witness is applied to thermal GHZ states to prove that the entanglement can be extremely robust to system imperfections.