Measuring multipartite entanglement through dynamic susceptibilities

Abstract

Entanglement is considered an essential resource in quantum technologies, and central to the understanding of quantum many-body physics. Developing protocols to detect and quantify the entanglement of many-particle quantum states is thus a key challenge for present experiments. Here, we show that the quantum Fisher information, a witness for genuinely multipartite entanglement, becomes measurable for thermal ensembles by means of the dynamic susceptibility—that is, with resources readily available in present cold atomic-gas and condensed-matter experiments. This establishes a connection between multipartite entanglement and many-body correlations contained in response functions, with immediate implications close to quantum phase transitions, where the quantum Fisher information becomes universal, allowing us to identify strongly entangled phase transitions with a divergent multipartite entanglement. We illustrate our framework using paradigmatic quantum Ising models, and point out potential signatures in optical-lattice experiments and strongly correlated materials.