We present a comprehensive study of maximally entangled symmetric states of arbitrary numbers of qubits in the sense of the maximal mixedness of the one-qubit reduced density operator. A general criterion is provided to easily identify whether given symmetric states are maximally entangled in that respect or not. We show that these maximally entangled symmetric (MES) states are the only symmetric states for which the expectation value of the associated collective spin of the system vanishes, as well as in corollary the dipole moment of the Husimi function. We establish the link between this kind of maximal entanglement, the anticoherence properties of spin states, and the degree of polarization of light fields. We analyze the relationship between the MES states and the classes of states equivalent through stochastic local operations with classical communication (SLOCC). We provide a nonexistence criterion of MES states within SLOCC classes of qubit states and show in particular that the symmetric Dicke state SLOCC classes never contain such MES states, with the only exception of the balanced Dicke state class for even numbers of qubits. The 4-qubit system is analyzed exhaustively and all MES states of this system are identified and characterized. Finally the entanglement content of MES states is analyzed with respect to the geometric and barycentric measures of entanglement, as well as to the generalized
N-tangle. We show that the geometric entanglement of MES states is ensured to be larger than or equal to
1/2, but also that MES states are not in general the symmetric states that maximize the investigated entanglement measures.
The geometric measure of entanglement is investigated for permutation symmetric pure states of multipartite qubit systems, in particular the question of maximum entanglement. This is done with the help of the Majorana representation, which maps an n qubit symmetric state to n points on the unit sphere. It is shown how symmetries of the point distribution can be exploited to simplify the calculation of entanglement and also help find the maximally entangled symmetric state. Using a combination of analytical and numerical results, the most entangled symmetric states for up to 12 qubits are explored and discussed. The optimization problem on the sphere presented here is then compared with two classical optimization problems on the S 2 sphere, namely Tóth's problem and Thomson's problem, and it is observed that, in general, they are different problems.