Stability of encoded macroscopic quantum superpositions

The multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state is a paradigmatic example of a highly entangled multipartite state with distinct quantum features. However, the GHZ state is very sensitive to generic decoherence processes, where its quantum features and, in particular, its entanglement diminish rapidly, thereby hindering possible practical applications. In this paper, we discuss GHZ-like quantum states with a block-local structure and show that they exhibit a drastically increased stability against noise for certain choices of block-encoding, thereby extending results of [Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 110402 (2011)]. We analyze in detail the decay of the interference terms, the entanglement in terms of distillable entanglement, and negativity as well as the notion of macroscopicity as measured by the so-called index q and provide general bounds on these quantities. We focus on an encoding where logical qubits are themselves encoded as GHZ states, which leads to so-called concatenated GHZ (C-GHZ) states. We compare the stability of C-GHZ states with other types of encodings, thereby showing the superior stability of the C-GHZ states. Analytic results are complemented by numerical studies, where tensor network techniques are used to investigate the quantum properties of multipartite entangled states under the influence of decoherence.