Scientific Reports (Jul 2017)
Critical behaviour in the optimal generation of multipartite entanglement
Abstract
Abstract Two systems whose correlations cannot be classically accounted for display the simplest instance of quantum entanglement. Although this two-party association has caused a revolution in the foundations and uses of quantum mechanics, genuine entanglement among several parties unveils a whole new class of phenomena and applications. In this work we suggest a way to prepare Dicke states from a tunable source of bipartite entanglement to investigate foundational issues. The scheme has the following distinctive features: (i) it relies on controlled information loss and unentangled measurements; (ii) irrespective of the source entanglement, whenever a Dicke state is produced, it is ideal; (iii) the optimal entanglement of the bipartite source undergoes a second-order-like transition depending on the parameters of the Dicke state to be produced. These properties lead to asymptotic results on the entanglement between any qubit belonging to a Dicke state and the remaining qubits.