Global entanglement in multiparticle systems

Abstract

We define a polynomial measure of multiparticle entanglement which is scalable, i.e., which applies to any number of spin-1/2 particles. By evaluating it for three particle states, for eigenstates of the one dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet and on quantum error correcting code subspaces, we illustrate the extent to which it quantifies global entanglement. We also apply it to track the evolution of entanglement during a quantum computation.Comment: 9 pages, plain TeX, 1 PostScript figure included with epsf.tex (ignore the under/overfull \vbox error messages); for related work see http://math.ucsd.edu/~dmeyer/research.html or http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~nwallach