Separability properties of tripartite states with U⊗U⊗U symmetry -: art. no. 042111

We study separability properties in a five-dimensional set of states of quantum systems composed of three subsystems of equal but arbitrary finite Hilbert space dimension. These are the states that can be written as linear combinations of permutation operators, or equivalently, commute with unitaries of the form U x U x U. We compute explicitly the following subsets and their extreme points: (1) triseparable states, which are convex combinations of triple tensor products, (2) biseparable states, which are separable for a twofold partition of the system, and (3) states with positive partial transpose with respect to such a partition. Tripartite entanglement is investigated in terms of the relative entropy of tripartite entanglement and of the trace norm.