General monogamy relation for the entanglement of formation in multiqubit systems

Abstract

We prove exactly that the squared entanglement of formation, which quantifies the bipartite entanglement, obeys a general monogamy inequality in an arbitrary multiqubit mixed state. Based on this kind of exotic monogamy relation, we are able to construct two sets of useful entanglement indicator: the first one can detect all genuine multiqubit entangled states even in the case of the two-qubit concurrence and $n$-tangles being zero, while the second one can be calculated via quantum discord and applied to multipartite entanglement dynamics. Moreover, we give a computable and nontrivial lower bound for multiqubit entanglement of formation.