Entanglement of three-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-symmetric states

The first characterization of mixed-state entanglement was achieved for two-qubit states in Werner's seminal work [Phys. Rev. A 40, 4277 (1989)]. A physically important extension concerns mixtures of a pure entangled state [such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state] and the unpolarized state. These mixed states serve as benchmark for the robustness of multipartite entanglement. They share the symmetries of the GHZ state. We call such states GHZ symmetric. Here we give a complete description of the entanglement in the family of three-qubit GHZ-symmetric states and, in particular, of the three-qubit generalized Werner states. Our method relies on the appropriate parametrization of the states and on the invariance of entanglement properties under general local operations. An application is the definition of a symmetrization witness for the entanglement class of arbitrary three-qubit states.