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arXiv:2607.12317

Demonstration of tripartite cat states in two distinct classes of entanglement

May Chee Loke, Jonathan Schwinger, Kehui Yu, Yingshan Zhang, Amon M. Kasper, Tanjung Krisnanda, Yvonne Y. Gao

quant-phSubmitted Jul 14, 2026• Announced Jul 15, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jul 14, 2026v2 · Oct 21, 2026
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Abstract

Entanglement is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and an essential resource for quantum computation, communication, and metrology. While bipartite entanglement is extensively studied, genuine multipartite entangled states remain largely inaccessible in the macroscopic continuous-variable domain. Here, we experimentally realize macroscopic tripartite entangled cat states of the two distinct classes with fundamentally inequivalent properties, namely GHZ-cat and W-cat states, encoded across three microwave resonators coupled to an ancillary superconducting transmon. We develop one-to-all conditional controls on the three oscillators by fully utilizing three energy levels of the transmon to generate these states in a single piece of hardware and employ an efficient subspace tomography protocol for state reconstruction. We obtain GHZ-cat and W-cat states with fidelities $0.83\pm0.02$ and $0.70\pm0.02$, respectively, certifying genuine multipartite entanglement among the three oscillators. We further validate the distinct entanglement classes by experimentally demonstrating that pairwise entanglement is present in the W-cat state but absent in the GHZ-cat state. Our technique for the on-demand generation and characterization of inequivalent classes of tripartite continuous-variable entanglement provides a valuable testbed for future studies of macroscopic many-body entanglement and fault-tolerant quantum information processing with multipartite bosonic codes.

Comments
Main text: 7 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary information: 18 pages, 9 figures

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Entanglement is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and an essential resource for quantum computation, communication, and metrology. While bipartite entanglement is extensively studied, genuine multipartite entangled states remain largely inaccessible in the macroscopic continuous-variable domain. Here, we experimentally realize macroscopic tripartite entangled cat states of the two distinct classes with fundamentally inequivalent properties, namely GHZ-cat and W-cat states, encoded across three microwave resonators coupled to an ancillary superconducting transmon. We develop one-to-all conditional controls on the three oscillators by fully utilizing three energy levels of the transmon to generate these states in a single piece of hardware and employ an efficient subspace tomography protocol for state reconstruction. We obtain GHZ-cat and W-cat states with fidelities 0.83±0.020.83\pm0.020.83±0.02 and 0.70±0.020.70\pm0.020.70±0.02, respectively, certifying genuine multipartite entanglement among the three oscillators. We further validate the distinct entanglement classes by experimentally demonstrating that pairwise entanglement is present in the W-cat state but absent in the GHZ-cat state. Our technique for the on-demand generation and characterization of inequivalent classes of tripartite continuous-variable entanglement provides a valuable testbed for future studies of macroscopic many-body entanglement and fault-tolerant quantum information processing with multipartite bosonic codes.
Schrödinger's cat originates from the famous thought experiment querying the counterintuitive quantum superposition of macroscopic objects. As a natural extension, several "cats" (quasi-classical objects) can be prepared into coherent quantum superposition states, which is known as multipartite cat states demonstrating quantum entanglement among macroscopically distinct objects. Here, we present a highly scalable approach to deterministically create flying multipartite Schrödinger's cat states by reflecting coherent-state photons from a microwave cavity containing a superconducting qubit. We perform full quantum state tomography on the cat states with up to four photonic modes and confirm the existence of quantum entanglement among them. We also witness the hybrid entanglement between discrete-variable states (the qubit) and continuous-variable states (the flying multipartite cat) through a joint quantum state tomography. Our work provides an enabling step for implementing a series of quantum metrology and quantum information processing protocols based on cat states.
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Many existing genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) witnesses for continuous-variable (CV) quantum systems typically rely on quadrature measurements, which are challenging to implement in platforms where the CV degrees of freedom can be indirectly accessed only through qubit readouts. In this work, we propose methods to implement GME witnesses through phase-space measurements in state-of-the-art experimental platforms, leveraging controlled Gaussian unitaries readily available in qubit-CV architectures. Based on two theoretical results showing that sufficient Wigner negativity can certify GME, we present five concrete implementation schemes using controlled parity, displacement, and beam-splitter operations. Our witnesses can detect paradigmatic GME states like the Dicke and multipartite N00NN00NN00N states, which include the WWW states as a special case, and GHZ-type entangled cat states. We analyze the performance of these witnesses under realistic noise conditions and finite measurement resolution, showing their robustness to experimental imperfections. Crucially, our implementations require exponentially fewer measurement settings than full tomography, with one scheme requiring only a single measurement on auxiliary modes. The methods are readily applicable to circuit/cavity quantum electrodynamics, circuit quantum acoustodynamics, as well as trapped ions and atomic systems, where such dichotomic phase-space measurements are already routinely performed as native readouts.
The pair coherent state (PCS) is a theoretical extension of the Glauber coherent state to two harmonic oscillators. It is an interesting class of non-Gaussian continuous-variable entangled state and is also at the heart of a promising quantum error correction code: the pair cat code. Here we report an experimental demonstration of the pair coherent state of microwave photons in two superconducting cavities. We implement a cross-cavity pair-photon driven dissipation process, which conserves the photon number difference between cavities and stabilizes the state to a specific complex amplitude. We further introduce a technique of quantum subspace tomography, which enables direct measurements of individual coherence elements of a high-dimensional quantum state without global tomographic reconstruction. We characterize our two-mode quantum state with up to 4 photons in each cavity using this subspace tomography together with direct measurements of the photon number difference and the joint Wigner function. We identify the spurious cross-Kerr interaction between the cavities and our dissipative reservoir mode as a prominent dephasing channel that limits the steady-state coherence in our current scheme. Our experiment provides a set of reservoir engineering and state characterization tools to study quantum optics and implement multi-mode bosonic codes in superconducting circuits.
Continuous-variable (CV) multipartite entangled states, particularly Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states, are an indispensable resource for quantum networks and quantum information processing. Conventional approaches to generating CV GHZ states rely on combining multiple independently prepared squeezed lights through complex interferometric networks, which impose significant challenges in scalability and stability. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a compact and resource-efficient scheme for generating a tripartite CV GHZ state from a single quantum frequency comb produced by a synchronously pumped optical parametric oscillator. By employing multipixel homodyne detection, we simultaneously measure quadrature fluctuations across multiple frequency bands and reconstruct the full multimode covariance matrix in a single measurement. Through eigenmode decomposition, we extract a set of independent squeezed supermodes, which are subsequently transformed via a tailored linear unitary operation implemented in post-processing. Using this approach, we deterministically construct a tripartite GHZ state from three supermodes and verify its entanglement via the van Loock–Furusawa criteria, with the corresponding correlation variances measured to be 0.57, 0.75, and 0.57, all below the shot noise limit. This method effectively realizes a scalable entanglement generation scheme within a single optical beam, eliminating the need for complex interferometric networks. Our results provide a scalable and versatile platform for multimode quantum information processing.
Non-Gaussian interactions are a key ingredient for achieving universality in continuous-variable quantum computation, yet their experimental characterization and the validation of their correct implementation remain challenging tasks. In this work, we focus on a three-mode non-Gaussian trilinear Hamiltonian that has recently been realized in superconducting microwave platforms, and present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the computational resources it generates, together with experimentally accessible protocols to validate their presence. We systematically investigate its ability to generate two key resources for quantum computation: multipartite entanglement and Wigner negativity. In particular, using displaced-parity Bell tests, we demonstrate the generation of nonlocal states and thereby provide an operational certification of multipartite entanglement in the non-Gaussian states produced by the dynamics. We further quantify the Wigner logarithmic negativity and benchmark it against that of established non-Gaussian resource states. Building on this resource-based characterization, we introduce a measurement-efficient protocol for the experimental validation of the Hamiltonian implementation without requiring full reconstruction of the Wigner function. The protocol combines the measurement of zero-variance observables (nullifiers and stabilizers) with a limited number of targeted phase-space measurements, leading to a drastic reduction of the experimental overhead.