Precise detection of multipartite entanglement in four-qubit Greenberger--Horne--Zeilinger diagonal states

Abstract

We propose a method of constructing the separability criteria for multipartite quantum states on the basis of entanglement witnesses. The entanglement witnesses are obtained by finding the maximal expectation values of Hermitian operators and then optimizing over all possible Hermitian operators. We derive a set of tripartite separability criteria for the four-qubit Greenberger--Horne--Zeilinger (GHZ) diagonal states. The derived criterion set contains four criteria that are necessary and sufficient for the tripartite separability of the highly symmetric four-qubit GHZ diagonal states; the criteria completely account for the numerically obtained boundaries of the tripartite separable state set. One of the criteria is just the tripartite separability criterion of the four-qubit generalized Werner states.