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.

Any pure entangled state of two particles violates a Bell inequality for two-particle correlation functions (Gisin’s theorem). We show that there exist pure entangled $N>\mathrm{}2\mathrm{}$ qubit states that do not violate any Bell inequality for $N$ particle correlation functions for experiments involving two dichotomic observables per local measuring station. We also find that Mermin-Ardehali-Belinskii-Klyshko inequalities may not always be optimal for refutation of local realistic description.

We demonstrate that the presence of entanglement in macroscopic bodies (e.g., solids) in thermodynamical equilibrium could be revealed by measuring heat capacity. The idea is that if the system was in a separable state, then for certain Hamiltonians heat capacity would not tend asymptotically to zero as the temperature approaches absolute zero. Since this would contradict the third law of thermodynamics, one concludes that the system must contain entanglement. The separable bounds are obtained by minimalization of the heat capacity over separable states and using its universal low-temperature behavior. Our results open up a possibility to use standard experimental techniques of solid-state physics—namely, heat-capacity measurements—to detect entanglement in macroscopic samples.