We present entcalc, a Python and MATLAB package for estimating the geometric entanglement of multipartite quantum states. The package operates as follows: given a multipartite quantum state as input, it outputs an estimate of its geometric entanglement. For pure states, it computes the geometric entanglement together with an estimation error. For mixed states, it provides both lower and upper bounds on the geometric entanglement, thereby identifying an interval in which the true value lies. We provide several methods to compute the lower bound, enabling users to balance accuracy against computational cost. We apply entcalc to several representative examples, including for
3⊗3 PPT entangled states, mixtures of GHZ and W states, thermal states of selected three-qubit spin chains, and noisy GHZ and W states. We observe signatures of quantum phase transitions by quantifying entanglement in spin chains. We also demonstrate that entanglement between non-neighbouring sites can be activated by tuning the external magnetic field. In all tested cases, the gap between the lower and upper bounds is found to be very small, indicating that entcalc provides highly accurate estimates of the geometric entanglement for these states.
Here we show how the Minimally Entangled States (MES) of a 2d system with topological order can be identified using the geometric measure of entanglement. We show this by minimizing this measure for the doubled semion, doubled Fibonacci and toric code models on a torus with non-trivial topological partitions. Our calculations are done either quasi-exactly for small system sizes, or using the tensor network approach in Orús et al (arXiv: 1406.0585 ) for large sizes. As a byproduct of our methods, we see that the minimisation of the geometric entanglement can also determine the number of Abelian quasiparticle excitations in a given model. The results in this paper provide a very efficient and accurate way of extracting the full topological information of a 2d quantum lattice model from the multipartite entanglement structure of its ground states.