Genuine Network Multipartite Entanglement

The standard definition of genuine multipartite entanglement stems from the need to assess the quantum control over an ever-growing number of quantum systems. We argue that this notion is easy to hack: in fact, a source capable of distributing bipartite entanglement can, by itself, generate genuine $k$-partite entangled states for any $k$. We propose an alternative definition for genuine multipartite entanglement, whereby a quantum state is genuinely network $k$-entangled if it cannot be produced by applying local trace-preserving maps over several $k$-partite states distributed among the parties, even with the aid of global shared randomness. We provide analytic and numerical witnesses of genuine network entanglement, and we reinterpret many past quantum experiments as demonstrations of this feature.