Entanglement of purification for multipartite states and its holographic dual

Abstract

We introduce a new information-theoretic measure of multipartite correlations ΔP, by generalizing the entanglement of purification to multipartite states. We provide proofs of its various properties, focusing on several entropic inequalities, in generic quantum systems. In particular, it turns out that the multipartite entanglement of purification gives an upper bound on multipartite mutual information, which is a generalization of quantum mutual information in the spirit of relative entropy. After that, motivated by a tensor network description of the AdS/CFT correspondence, we conjecture a holographic dual of multipartite entanglement of purification ΔW, as a sum of minimal areas of codimension-2 surfaces which divide the entanglement wedge into multi-pieces. We prove that this geometrical quantity satisfies all properties we proved for the multipartite entanglement of purification. These agreements strongly support the ΔP = ΔW conjecture. We also show that the multipartite entanglement of purification is larger than multipartite squashed entanglement, which is a promising measure of multipartite quantum entanglement. We discuss potential saturation of multipartite squashed entanglement onto multipartite mutual information in holographic CFTs and its applications.