We present a general theory for the construction of witnesses that detect genuine multipartite entanglement in graph states. First, we present explicit witnesses for all graph states of up to six qubits which are better than all criteria so far. Therefore, lower fidelities are required in experiments that aim at the preparation of graph states. Building on these results, we develop analytical methods to construct two different types of entanglement witnesses for general graph states. For many classes of states, these operators exhibit white noise tolerances that converge to 1 when increasing the number of particles. We illustrate our approach for states such as the linear and the 2D cluster state. Finally, we study an entanglement monotone motivated by our approach for graph states.

• Received 16 June 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.84.032310