ENTANGLEMENT MONOTONES AND MAXIMALLY ENTANGLED STATES IN MULTIPARTITE QUBIT SYSTEMS

Abstract

We present a method to construct entanglement measures for pure states of multipartite qubit systems. The key element of our approach is an antilinear operator that we call comb in reference to the hairy-ball theorem. For qubits (i.e. spin 1/2) the combs are automatically invariant under SL (2, ℂ). This implies that the filters obtained from the combs are entanglement monotones by construction. We give alternative formulae for the concurrence and the 3-tangle as expectation values of certain antilinear operators. As an application we discuss inequivalent types of genuine four-, five- and six-qubit entanglement.