We investigate the behaviour of multipartite entanglement in finite-size quantum spin systems, resorting to a hierarchy of geometric measures of multipartite entanglement recently introduced in the literature. In particular, we investigate the ground-state entanglement in the XY model defined on finite chains of N sites with periodic boundary conditions. We analyse the behaviour of the geometric measures of (N 1)-partite and (N/2)-partite entanglement and compare them with the Wei‐Goldbart geometric measure of global entanglement.
We introduce a class of generalized geometric measures of entanglement. For pure quantum states of
N elementary subsystems, they are defined as the distances from the sets of
K-separable states
(K=2,…,N). The entire set of generalized geometric measures provides a quantification and hierarchical ordering of the different bipartite and multipartite components of the global geometric entanglement, and allows discrimination among the different contributions. The extended measures are applied to the study of entanglement in different classes of
N-qubit pure states. These classes include
W and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, and their symmetric superpositions; symmetric multimagnon states; cluster states; and, finally, asymmetric generalized
W-like superposition states. We discuss in detail a general method for the explicit evaluation of the multipartite components of geometric entanglement, and we show that the entire set of geometric measures establishes an ordering among the different types of bipartite and multipartite entanglement. In particular, it determines a consistent hierarchy between GHZ and
W states, clarifying the original result of Wei and Goldbart that
W states possess a larger global entanglement than GHZ states. Furthermore, we show that all multipartite components of geometric entanglement in symmetric states obey a property of self-similarity and scale invariance with the total number of qubits and the number of qubits per party.
Using the geometric entanglement measure, we study the scaling of multipartite entanglement in several 1D models at criticality, specifically the linear harmonic chain and the XY spin chain encompassing both the Ising and XX critical models. Our results provide convincing evidence that 1D models at criticality exhibit a universal logarithmic scaling behavior ~(c/12)log l in the multipartite entanglement per region for a partition of the system into regions of size l, where c is the central charge of the corresponding universality class in conformal field theory.
We analyze the
XY model characterized by an anisotropy $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ in an external magnetic field,
h, with respect to its genuine multipartite entanglement content (in the thermodynamic and finite-size case). Despite its simplicity we show that the quantity---detecting genuine multipartite entanglement through permutation operators and being a lower bound on measures---witnesses the presence of genuine multipartite entanglement for nearly all values of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ and
h. We further show that the phase transition and scaling properties are fully characterized by this multipartite quantity. Consequently, we provide a useful toolbox for other condensed-matter systems, where bipartite entanglement measures are known to fail.