In this paper, an intuitive mathematical formulation is provided to
generalize the residual entanglement for tripartite systems of qubits [Phys.
Rev. A 61, 052306 (2000)] to the tripartite systems in higher dimension. The
spirit lies in the tensor treatment of tripartite pure states [Phys. Rev. A 72,
022333 (2005)]. A distinct characteristic of the present generalization is that
the formulation for higher dimensional systems is invariant under permutation
of the subsystems, hence is employed as a criterion to test the existence of
genuine tripartite entanglement. Furthermore, the formulation for pure states
can be conveniently extended to the case of mixed states by utilizing the
Kronecker product approximate technique. As applications, we give the analytic
approximation of the criterion for weakly mixed tripartite quantum states and
consider the existence of genuine tripartite entanglement of some weakly mixed
states.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure