The N-qubit states of the W class, for $N>\mathrm{}10,$ lead to more robust (against noise admixture) violations of local realism, than the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. These violations are most pronounced for correlations for a pair of qubits, conditioned on specific measurement results for the remaining $N-2$ qubits. The considerations provide us with a qualitative difference between the W state and GHZ state in the situation when they are separately sent via depolarizing channels. For sufficiently high amount of noise in the depolarizing channel, the GHZ states cannot produce a distillable state between two qubits, whereas the W states can still produce a distillable state in a similar situation.

• Received 25 June 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.68.062306