Generating W states with braiding operators

Abstract

Braiding operators can be used to create entangled states out of product states, thus establishing a correspondence between topological and quantum entanglement. This is well-known for maximally entangled Bell and GHZ states and their equivalent states under Stochastic Local Operations and Classical Communication, but so far a similar result for W states was missing. Here we use generators of extraspecial 2-groups to obtain the W state in a four-qubit space and partition algebras to generate the W state in a three-qubit space. We also present a unitary generalized Yang-Baxter operator that embeds the W_n state in a (2n-1)-qubit space.