Role of thermal noise in tripartite quantum steering

The influence of thermal noise on bipartite and tripartite quantum steering induced by a short laser pulse in a hybrid three-mode optomechanical system is investigated. The calculation is carried out under the bad cavity limit, the adiabatic approximation of a slowly varying amplitude of the cavity mode, and with the assumption of driving the cavity mode with a blue detuned strong laser pulse. Under such conditions, explicit expressions of the bipartite and tripartite steering parameters are obtained, and the concept of collective tripartite quantum steering, recently introduced by He and Reid [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 250403 (2013)], is clearly explored. It is found that both bipartite and tripartite steering parameters are sensitive functions of the initial state of the modes and distinctly different steering behaviour could be observed depending on whether the modes were initially in a thermal state or not. We find that the initial thermal noise is more effective in destroying the bipartite rather than the tripartite steering which, on the other hand, can persist even for a large thermal noise. For the initial vacuum state of a steered mode, the tripartite steering exists over the entire interaction time even if the steering modes are in very noisy thermal states. When the steered mode is initially in a thermal state, it can be collectively steered by the other modes. There are thresholds for the average number of the thermal photons above which the existing tripartite steering appears as the collective steering. Finally, we point out that the collective steering may provide a resource in a hybrid quantum network for quantum secret sharing protocol.