All bipartitions of arbitrary Dicke states

Abstract

By exploiting the permutation symmetry of Dick states, we derive closed analytical expressions of Schmidt decompositions for {\it all} possible bipartitions of a system described by this kind of state. This allows us to exhaustively compute the entropy of entanglement of the bipartitions and, thus, compare the their entanglement extent. We also address the multipartite character of Dicke states by calculating the purity of balanced bipartitions to determine the potential of multipartite entanglement (the average purity). In particular, we found that the entanglement of $W$ states remains constant as the number of qubits is increased. As a final application we define a family of multipartite entanglement witnesses and compute their resistance against random and systematic imperfections. It is shown that in some circumstances, for a fixed white noise fraction, the entanglement becomes detectable only if one {\it increases} the amount of systematic imperfection in the state.