This paper presents a new measure of entanglement which can be employed for multipartite entangled systems. The classification of multipartite entangled systems based on this measure is considered. Two approaches to applying this measure to mixed quantum states are discussed.
The detection and classification of entanglement properties in a two-qubit and a multi-qubit system is a topic of great interest. This topic has been extensively studied, and as a result, we discovered various approaches for detecting and classifying multi-qubit, in particular three-qubit entangled states. The emphasis of this work is on a formalism of methods for the detection and classification of bipartite as well as multipartite quantum systems. We have used the method of structural physical approximation of partially transposed matrix (SPA-PT) for the detection of entangled states in arbitrary dimensional bipartite quantum systems. Also, we have proposed criteria for the classification of all possible stochastic local operations and classical communication (SLOCC) inequivalent classes of a pure and mixed three-qubit state using the SPA-PT map. To quantify entanglement, we have defined a new measure of entanglement based on the method of SPA-PT, which we named as "structured negativity". We have shown that this measure can be used to quantify entanglement for negative partial transposed entangled states (NPTES). Since the methods for detection, classification and quantification of entanglement, defined in this thesis are based on SPA-PT, they may be realized in an experiment.
We present a measure of quantum entanglement which is capable of quantifying the degree of entanglement of a multi-partite quantum system. This measure, which is based on a generalization of the Schmidt rank of a pure state, is defined on the full state space and is shown to be an entanglement monotone, that is, it cannot increase under local quantum operations with classical communication and under mixing. For a large class of mixed states this measure of entanglement can be calculated exactly, and it provides a detailed classification of mixed states. We also present a connection to the best separable approximation of an entangled state of a two-qubit system.
The main concern of this paper is how to define proper measures of multipartite entanglement for mixed quantum states. Since the structure of partial separability and multipartite entanglement is getting complicated if the number of subsystems exceeds two, one cannot expect the existence of an ultimate scalar entanglement measure, which grasps even a small part of the rich hierarchical structure of multipartite entanglement, and some higher-order structure characterizing that is needed. In this paper we make some steps in this direction. First, we reveal the lattice-theoretic structure of the partial separability classification, introduced earlier [Sz. Szalay and Z. K\"ok\'enyesi, Phys. Rev. A 86, 032341 (2012)]. It turns out that, mathematically, the structure of the entanglement classes is the up-set lattice of the structure of the different kinds of partial separability, which is the down-set lattice of the lattice of the partitions of the subsystems. It also turns out that, physically, this structure is related to the local operations and classical communication convertibility: If a state from a class can be mapped into another one, then that class can be found higher in the hierarchy. Second, we introduce the notion of multipartite monotonicity, expressing that a given set of entanglement monotones, while measuring the different kinds of entanglement, shows also the same hierarchical structure as the entanglement classes. Then we construct such hierarchies of entanglement measures and propose a physically well-motivated one, being the direct multipartite generalization of the entanglement of formation based on the entanglement entropy, motivated by the notion of statistical distinguishability. The multipartite monotonicity shown by this set of measures motivates us to consider the measures to be the different manifestations of some ``unified'' notion of entanglement.