Demonstration of tripartite cat states in two distinct classes of entanglement

Entanglement is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and an essential resource for quantum computation, communication, and metrology. While bipartite entanglement is extensively studied, genuine multipartite entangled states remain largely inaccessible in the continuous-variable domain. Here, we experimentally realize continuous-variable tripartite entangled cat states of the two distinct classes with fundamentally inequivalent properties, namely GHZ-cat and W-cat states, encoded across three microwave resonators coupled to an ancillary superconducting transmon. We develop one-to-all conditional controls on the three oscillators by fully utilizing three energy levels of the transmon to generate these states in a single piece of hardware and employ an efficient subspace tomography protocol for state reconstruction. We obtain measurement-corrected state fidelities of 0.83 plus or minus0.02 for GHZ-cat and 0.70 plus or minus0.02 for W-cat, both exceeding the thresholds for genuine multipartite entanglement, with the W-state certification further supported by an optimized fully decomposable witness directly computed with the reconstructed density matrix. We validate the distinct entanglement classes by experimentally demonstrating that pairwise entanglement is present in the W-cat state but absent in the GHZ-cat state. Our technique for the on-demand generation and characterization of inequivalent classes of tripartite continuous-variable entanglement provides a testbed for studying multipartite bosonic entanglement and its robustness to loss, and a building block for future quantum information processing with multipartite bosonic codes.