The hierarchy of nonlocality and entanglement in multipartite systems is one of the fundamental problems in quantum physics. We study this topic in three-qubit systems considering the entanglement classification of stochastic local operations and classical communication (SLOCC). The equivalence under SLOCC divides three-qubit states into separable, biseparable,
W, and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) classes. The
W and GHZ are two subclasses of genuine tripartite entanglement. We adopt the family of GHZ-symmetric states as a research subject, which share the symmetries of the GHZ state and have a complete characterization of SLOCC classes. In the biseparable region (with bipartite entanglement), there exist GHZ-symmetric states that are found to be fully local. In addition, there are bilocal states in both the
W and GHZ classes. That is, neither of the subclasses of genuine tripartite entanglement can ensure genuinely tripartite nonlocality.
The violation of the Svetlichny's inequality (SI) [Phys. Rev. D 35, 3066 (1987)] is sufficient but not necessary for genuine tripartite nonlocal correlations. Here we quantify the relationship between tripartite entanglement and the maximum expectation value of the Svetlichny operator (which is bounded from above by the inequality) for the two inequivalent subclasses of pure three-qubit states: the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) class and the
W class. We show that the maximum for the GHZ-class states reduces to Mermin's inequality [Phys. Rev. Lett. 65, 1838 (1990)] modulo a constant factor, and although it is a function of the three tangle and the residual concurrence, large numbers of states do not violate the inequality. We further show that by design SI is more suitable as a measure of genuine tripartite nonlocality between the three qubits in the
W-class states, and the maximum is a certain function of the bipartite entanglement (the concurrence) of the three reduced states, and only when their sum attains a certain threshold value do they violate the inequality.
In this paper, we investigate the genuine three-way nonlocality which is recognized as the strongest form of tripartite correlations. We consider theoretically and experimentally a series of suitable Bell-type inequalities a violation of which is sufficient for the detection of three-way nonlocality. For the generalized GHZ (gGHZ) states, it is demonstrated that they do violate tripartite Bell-type inequalities for any degree of tripartite entanglement even if they do not violate Svetlichny inequality. It implies that three-way entangled gGHZ can always exhibit genuine three-way nonlocality under the requirement of time-order-dependent principle. Furthermore, we have determined the maximal amount of noise admissible for the gGHZ states to still remain genuine three-way nonlocal.