Quantifying tripartite spatial and energy-time entanglement in nonlinear optics

Abstract

In this work, we provide a means to quantify genuine tripartite entanglement in arbitrary (pure and mixed) continuous-variable states as measured by the tripartite entanglement of formation—a resource-based measure quantifying genuine multipartite entanglement in units of elementary Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states called gebits. Furthermore, we predict its effectiveness in quantifying the tripartite spatial and energy-time entanglement in photon triplets generated in cascaded spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), and find that ordinary nonlinear optics can be a substantial resource of tripartite entanglement.