Search

Abstract Quantifying entanglement is vital to understand entanglement as a resource in quantum information processing, and many entanglement measures have been suggested for this purpose. When mathematically defining an entanglement measure, we should consider the distinguishability between entangled and separable states, the invariance under local transformation, the monotonicity under local operations and classical communication, and the convexity. These are reasonable requirements but may be insufficient, in particular when taking into account the usefulness of quantum states in multi-party quantum information processing. Therefore, if we want to investigate multipartite entanglement as a resource, then it can be necessary to consider the usefulness of quantum states in multi-party quantum information processing when we define a multipartite entanglement measure. In this paper, we define new multipartite entanglement measures for three-qubit systems based on the three-party teleportation capability, and show that these entanglement measures satisfy the requirements for being genuine multipartite entanglement measures. We also generalize our entanglement measures for N-qubit systems, where $$N \ge 4$$ N ≥ 4 , and discuss that these quantities may be good candidates to measure genuine multipartite entanglement.

Abstract We look into multipartite quantum states on which quantum cryptographic protocols including quantum key distribution and quantum secret sharing can be perfectly performed, and define the quantum cryptographic resource distillable rate as the asymptotic rate at which such multipartite state can be distilled from a given multipartite state. Investigating several relations between entanglement and the rate, we show that there exists a multipartite bound entangled state whose quantum cryptographic resource distillable rate is strictly positive, that is, there exists a multipartite entangled state which is not distillable, but can be useful for quantum cryptography such as quantum key distribution and quantum secret sharing.