Complete set of operational measures for the characterization of 3-qubit entanglement

Abstract

We characterize the entanglement contained in a pure three-qubit state via operational entanglement measures. To this end we derive a new decomposition for arbitrary 3-qubit states which is characterized by five parameters (up to local unitary operations). We show that these parameters are uniquely determined by bipartite entanglement measures. These quantities measure on the one hand the entanglement required to generate the state and on the other hand the entanglement contained in the state and have a clear physical meaning. Moreover, we show that the classification of states obtained in this way is strongly related to the one obtained when considering general local operations and classical communication.