Multi-partite entanglement and quantum phase transition in the one-, two-, and three-dimensional transverse field Ising model

In this paper we consider the quantum phase transition in the Ising model in the presence of a transverse field in one, two and three dimensions from a multi-partite entanglement point of view. Using exact numerical solutions, we are able to study such systems up to 25 qubits. The Meyer-Wallach measure of global entanglement is used to study the critical behavior of this model. The transition we consider is between a symmetric GHZ-like state to a paramagnetic product-state. We find that global entanglement serves as a good indicator of quantum phase transition with interesting scaling behavior. We use finite-size scaling to extract the critical point as well as some critical exponents for the one and two dimensional models. Our results indicate that such multi-partite measure of global entanglement shows universal features regardless of dimension d. Our results also provides evidence that multi-partite entanglement is better suited for the study of quantum phase transitions than the much studied bi-partite measures.