Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states and few-body Hamiltonians

The generation of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states is a crucial problem in quantum information. We derive general conditions for obtaining GHZ states as eigenstates of a Hamiltonian. In general, degeneracy cannot be avoided if the Hamiltonian contains m-body interaction terms with m<=2 and a number of qubits strictly larger than 4. As an application, we explicitly construct a two-body 4-qubit Hamiltonian and a three-body 5-qubit Hamiltonian that exhibit a GHZ as a nondegenerate eigenstate.