Anisotropy and Magnetic Field Effects on the Genuine Multipartite Entanglement of Multi-Qubit Heisenberg {\it XY} Chains

It has been shown that, for the two-qubit Heisenberg XY model, anisotropy and magnetic field may together be used to produce entanglement for any finite temperature by adjusting the external magnetic field beyond some finite critical strength. This interesting result arises from an analysis employing the Wootters concurrence, a computable measure of entanglement for two-qubit states. Recently, Mintert {\em et al.} proposed generalizations of Wootters concurrence for multipartite states. These MKB concurrences possess a mathematical property that enables one to understand the origin of this characteristic behavior. Here, we first study the effect of anisotropy and magnetic field on the multipartite thermal entanglement of a four-qubit Heisenberg XY chain using the MKB concurrences. We show that this model exhibits characteristic behavior similar to that of the two-qubit model. In addition, we show that this can again be understood using the same mathematical property. Next, we show that the six-qubit Heisenberg XY chain possesses properties necessary for it to have the characteristic behavior too. Most importantly, it is possible to directly measure the multipartite MKB concurrences of pure states. This may provide an experimental verification of our conjecture that for a Heisenberg XY chain of any even number of qubits, it is always possible to obtain non-zero genuine multipartite entanglement at any finite temperature by applying a sufficiently large magnetic field.