Planar Maximally Entangled States

Abstract: We construct a large family of Planar Maximally Entangled (PME) states which are a wider class of multi-partite entangled states than Absolutely Maximally Entangled (AME) states. These are states in which any half of the qudits are in a maximally mixed state, provided that they form a connected subset. We show that in contrast to AMEs, PMEs are easier to find and there are various PMEs for any even number of qudits. In particular, while it is known that no AME state of four qubits exists, we show that there are two distinct multi-parameter classes of four qubit PMEs. We also give explicit families of PMEs for any even number of particles and for any dimension.