Robustness of Multi-Party Entanglement

How common is large-scale entanglement in nature? As a first step towards addressing this question, we study the robustness of multi-party entanglement under local decoherence, modeled by partially depolarizing channels acting independently on each subsystem. Surprisingly, we find that n-qubit GHZ entanglement can stand more than 55 % local depolarization in the limit of n going to infinity, and that GHZ states are more robust than other generic states of 3 and 4 qubits. We also study spin-squeezed states in the limit n going to infinity and find that they too can stand considerable local depolarization.