Multimode mechanical resonators offer a large set of densely packed, long-lived bosonic modes within a single compact device, making them attractive for quantum simulation, quantum information processing, and quantum-enhanced sensing. Many such applications rely on multipartite entanglement, yet deterministic mechanical entanglement has so far been largely limited to pairs of modes. Here we demonstrate the deterministic and programmable preparation of multipartite entangled states among the phonon modes of a high-overtone bulk acoustic wave resonator coupled to a superconducting transmon qubit. By sequentially applying optimal-control-engineered isometries between the qubit and successive modes, we generate matrix product states of bond dimension two, including
W, Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ), and cluster states. We fully characterize these states via quantum state tomography and certify genuine multipartite entanglement among up to four modes. We further demonstrate correlated-noise sensing by exploiting the complementary decoherence responses of the stored
W and GHZ states, isolating inter-mode phase correlations from local decoherence and placing quantitative bounds on collective dephasing. Our results establish a scalable approach to preparing multipartite entangled states in mechanical systems, with promising applications in multiparameter sensing and tests of quantum mechanics with massive objects.
We investigate the systematic use of the Schwinger representation, by virtue of which two boson fields are equivalent to an effective spin, for casting multimode squeezed states into multipartite spin entangled states. The motivation for this endeavor is the following established fact: finitely squeezed, two-mode entangled states can be recast into maximally entangled bipartite spin states, irrespective of their level of squeezing (in the lossless case). This work explores the generalization of this interesting property to multipartite entanglement. While we found that the generalization of multipartite Gaussian entanglement to multipartite spin entanglement is not straightforward, there are nonetheless interesting features and entangled states to be found. Here we study a few continuous-variable entangled states already realized experimentally, and show that some of them correspond to multipartite spin entangled states.
We consider a multipartite system consisting of two noninteracting qubits each embedded in a single-mode leaky cavity, in turn connected to an external bosonic reservoir. Initially, we take the two qubits in an entangled state while the cavities and the reservoirs have zero photons. We investigate, in this six-partite quantum system, the transfer of quantum discord from the qubits to the cavities and reservoirs. We show that this transfer also occurs when the cavities are not entangled. Moreover, we discuss how quantum discord can be extracted from the cavities and transferred to distant systems by traveling leaking photons, using the input–output theory.