Three-qubit Thermal Entanglement via Entanglement Swapping on Two-qubit Heisenberg XY chains

In this paper we consider the generation of a three-qubit GHZ-like thermal state by applying the entanglement swapping scheme of Zukowski {\it et al.} [Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. {\bf 755}, 91 (1995)] to three pairs of two-qubit Heisenberg XY chains. The quality of the resulting three-qubit entanglement is studied by analyzing the teleportation fidelity, when it is used as a resource in the teleportation protocol of Karlsson {\it et al.}[Phys. Rev. A {\bf 58}, 4394 (1998)]. We show that even though thermal noise in the original two-qubit states is amplified by the entanglement swapping process, we are still able to achieve nonclassical fidelities for the anisotropic Heisenberg XY chains at finitely higher and higher temperatures by adjusting the strengths of an external magnetic field. This has a positive implication on the solid-state realization of a quantum computer.