Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Open Access

Experimental Verification of Multicopy Activation of Genuine Multipartite Entanglement

Robert Stárek1,*, Tim Gollerthan2, Olga Leskovjanová1, Michael Meth2, Peter Tirler2, Nicolai Friis3, Martin Ringbauer2, and Ladislav Mišta, Jr.1,†

  • *Contact author: starek@optics.upol.cz
  • †Contact author: mista@optics.upol.cz

Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 160201 – Published 20 April, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/kv4s-tfc6

Abstract

A central concept in quantum information processing is genuine multipartite entanglement (GME), a type of correlation beyond biseparability, that is, correlations that cannot be explained by statistical mixtures of partially separable states. GME is relevant for characterizing and benchmarking complex quantum systems, and it is an important resource for applications such as quantum communication. Remarkably, it has been found that GME can be activated from multiple copies of biseparable quantum states, which do not possess GME individually. Here, we experimentally demonstrate unambiguous evidence of such GME activation from two copies of a biseparable three-qubit state in a trapped-ion quantum processor. These results not only challenge notions of quantum resources but also highlight the potential of using multiple copies of quantum states to achieve tasks beyond the capabilities of the individual copies.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

Supplemental Material

References (46)

  1. H. J. Kimble, Nature (London) 453, 1023 (2008).
  2. W. Dür, R. Lamprecht, and S. Heusler, Eur. J. Phys. 38, 043001 (2017).
  3. C. Simon, Nat. Photonics 11, 678 (2017).
  4. S. Wehner, D. Elkouss, and R. Hanson, Science 362, eaam9288 (2018).
  5. A. S. Cacciapuoti, M. Caleffi, F. Tafuri, F. S. Cataliotti, S. Gherardini, and G. Bianchi, IEEE Network 34, 137 (2020).
  6. M. Navascues, E. Wolfe, D. Rosset, and A. Pozas-Kerstjens, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 240505 (2020).
  7. M. Navascués and E. Wolfe, J. Causal Infer. 8, 70 (2020).
  8. T. Kraft, S. Designolle, C. Ritz, N. Brunner, O. Gühne, and M. Huber, Phys. Rev. A 103, L060401 (2021).
  9. E. Wolfe, A. Pozas-Kerstjens, M. Grinberg, D. Rosset, A. Acín, and M. Navascués, Phys. Rev. X 11, 021043 (2021).
  10. T. Kraft, C. Spee, X.-D. Yu, and O. Gühne, Phys. Rev. A 103, 052405 (2021).
  11. K. Hansenne, Z.-P. Xu, T. Kraft, and O. Gühne, Nat. Commun. 13, 496 (2022).
  12. N. K. H. Li, X. Dai, M. H. Muñoz-Arias, K. Reuer, M. Huber, and N. Friis, Nat. Commun. 17, 1707 (2026).
  13. P. Contreras-Tejada, C. Palazuelos, and J. I. de Vicente, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 040501 (2021).
  14. P. Contreras-Tejada, C. Palazuelos, and J. I. de Vicente, Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 220501 (2022).
  15. S. Morelli, D. Sauerwein, M. Skotiniotis, and N. Friis, Quantum 6, 722 (2022).
  16. J.-C. Besse, K. Reuer, M. C. Collodo, A. Wulff, L. Wernli, A. Copetudo, D. Malz, P. Magnard, A. Akin, M. Gabureac, G. J. Norris, J. I. Cirac, A. Wallraff, and C. Eichler, Nat. Commun. 11, 4877 (2020).
  17. M. Pompili, S. L. N. Hermans, S. Baier, H. K. C. Beukers, P. C. Humphreys, R. N. Schouten, R. F. L. Vermeulen, M. J. Tiggelman, L. dos Santos Martins, B. Dirkse, S. Wehner, and R. Hanson, Science 372, 259 (2021).
  18. A. Ruskuc, C.-J. Wu, E. Green, S. L. N. Hermans, W. Pajak, J. Choi, and A. Faraon, Nature (London) 639, 54 (2025).
  19. J. Shi, S. Zhang, Y. Wu, Y. Sun, Y. Liang, H. Wang, Y. Pu, and L. Duan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 150802 (2025).
  20. M. Canteri, J. Bate, I. Mishra, N. Friis, V. Krutyanskiy, and B. P. Lanyon, arXiv:2510.15693.
  21. R. A. Bertlmann and N. Friis, Modern Quantum Theory—From Quantum Mechanics to Entanglement and Quantum Information (Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2023).
  22. G. Tóth, Phys. Rev. A 85, 022322 (2012).
  23. R. Raussendorf and H. J. Briegel, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 5188 (2001).
  24. H. J. Briegel and R. Raussendorf, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 910 (2001).
  25. A. J. Scott, Phys. Rev. A 69, 052330 (2004).
  26. M. Epping, H. Kampermann, C. Macchiavello, and D. Bruß, New J. Phys. 19, 093012 (2017).
  27. M. Pivoluska, M. Huber, and M. Malik, Phys. Rev. A 97, 032312 (2018).
  28. J. Ribeiro, G. Murta, and S. Wehner, Phys. Rev. A 97, 022307 (2018).
  29. S. Bäuml and K. Azuma, Quantum Sci. Technol. 2, 024004 (2017).
  30. H. Yamasaki, A. Pirker, M. Murao, W. Dür, and B. Kraus, Phys. Rev. A 98, 052313 (2018).
  31. M. Huber and M. Plesch, Phys. Rev. A 83, 062321 (2011).
  32. H. Yamasaki, S. Morelli, M. Miethlinger, J. Bavaresco, N. Friis, and M. Huber, Quantum 6, 695 (2022).
  33. C. Palazuelos and J. I. de Vicente, Quantum 6, 735 (2022).
  34. K. Baksová, O. Leskovjanová, L. Mišta, Jr., E. Agudelo, and N. Friis, Quantum 9, 1699 (2025).
  35. L. T. Weinbrenner, K. Baksová, S. Denker, S. Morelli, X.-D. Yu, N. Friis, and O. Gühne, arXiv:2412.18331.
  36. Y.-A. Chen, R. Zhang, Y.-Y. Fei, Z. Liu, X. Zhang, X.-F. Yin, Y. Mao, L. Li, N.-L. Liu, X. Ma, and J.-W. Pan, Entanglement Activation in Multiphoton Distillation Networks (2024), 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3828402/v1.
  37. J. T. Barreiro, P. Schindler, O. Gühne, T. Monz, M. Chwalla, C. F. Roos, M. Hennrich, and R. Blatt, Nat. Phys. 6, 943 (2010).
  38. M. Hofmann, A. Osterloh, and O. Gühne, Phys. Rev. B 89, 134101 (2014).
  39. B. Jungnitsch, T. Moroder, and O. Gühne, Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 190502 (2011).
  40. A. Peres, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 1413 (1996).
  41. P. Horodecki, Phys. Lett. A 232, 333 (1997).
  42. See Supplemental Material at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/kv4s-tfc6 for details on the two-copy GME witness, algorithm for proving biseparability, and uncertainty calculation of a witness mean value.
  43. M. Ringbauer, M. Meth, L. Postler, R. Stricker, R. Blatt, P. Schindler, and T. Monz, Nat. Phys. 18, 1053 (2022).
  44. A. Sørensen and K. Mølmer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 1971 (1999).
  45. Z. Hradil, J. Řeháček, J. Fiurášek, and M. Ježek, Maximum-likelihood methods in quantum mechanics, in Quantum State Estimation, edited by M. Paris and J. Řeháček (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2004), pp. 59–112.
  46. R. Stárek, T. Gollerthan, O. Leskovjanová, M. Meth, P. Tirler, N. Friis, M. Ringbauer, and L. Mišta, Jr., Experimental verification of multi-copy activation of genuine multipartite entanglement—data and code, 10.5281/zenodo.17357727 (2025).

Outline

Information

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation