Generation of Hexapartite Entanglement in a Four-Wave-mixing Process with a Spatially Structured Pump: Theoretical Study

We have experimentally shown in a recent paper [Wang et al., Phys. Rev. A 95, 051802(R) (2017)] that a four-wave mixing (FWM) process in a Rb vapor with a spatially structured pump (SSP), consisting of a coherent combination of two tilted pump beams, can generate six well-separated bright beams that are quantum correlated. The experimental setup is compact, simple, phase insensitive, and easily scalable to a larger number of quantum correlated beams. For applications to quantum information processing, multipartite entanglement is needed in addition to quantum correlations. Very recently, we have also experimentally demonstrated the generation of the hexapartite entanglement from this SSP-based FWM process [Zhang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 090501 (2020)]. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to extensively investigate the hexapartite entanglement properties by using different entanglement witnesses such as the van Loock-Furusawa criterion and the positivity under partial transposition criterion. We find that hexapartite entanglement is indeed present among the six beams. In addition, we also study the supermodes of this system using basis change.