Irreducible Architectures of Multipartite Entanglement

Abstract

Multipartite entanglement is commonly characterized by scalar notions such as separability and entanglement depth, which do not resolve the distribution of entangled cluster sizes. For mixed states, we introduce formation profiles that assign weights to the entanglement architectures appearing in pure-state decompositions. We show that after discarding every profile that admits a strictly weaker feasible replacement, the remaining irreducible structure need not be unique: a four-qubit example exhibits a continuous family of incomparable irreducible profiles. Monotone functions of the architectures recover widely used scalar quantifiers as special cases, whereas the full profile geometry retains additional information, including the minimum weight that every decomposition must assign outside a chosen architectural class. Finally, we derive experimentally accessible bounds on these weights from convex witnesses, including the quantum Fisher information, thereby connecting detailed formation structure with practical entanglement certification.