Multipartite entanglement measures

The main concern of this paper is how to define proper measures of multipartite entanglement for mixed quantum states. Since the structure of partial separability and multipartite entanglement is getting complicated if the number of subsystems exceeds two, one can not expect the existence of an ultimate scalar entanglement measure, which grasps even a small part of the rich hierarchical structure of multipartite entanglement, and some higher order structure characterizing that is needed. In this paper we make some steps towards this direction. First, we reveal the lattice-theoretic structure of the partial separability classification, introduced earlier [Sz. Szalay and Z. Kokenyesi, Phys. Rev. A 86, 032341 (2012)]. It turns out that, mathematically, the structure of the entanglement classes is the up-set lattice of the structure of the different kinds of partial separability, which is the down-set lattice of the lattice of the partitions of the subsystems. It turns also out that, physically, this structure is related to the LOCC convertibility: If a state from a class can be mapped into another one, then that class can be found higher in the hierarchy. Second, we introduce the notion of multipartite monotonicity, expressing that a given set of entanglement monotones, while measuring the different kinds of entanglement, shows also the same hierarchical structure as the entanglement classes. Then we construct such hierarchies of entanglement measures, and propose a physically well-motivated one, being the direct multipartite generalization of the entanglement of formation based on the entanglement entropy, motivated by the notion of statistical distinguishability. The multipartite monotonicity shown by this set of measures motivates us to consider the measures to be the different manifestations of some "unified" notion of entanglement.