Do gravitational waves assist the genuine tripartite entanglement harvesting?

We investigate the harvesting of genuine tripartite entanglement by three linearly arranged Unruh-DeWitt detectors locally coupled to a massless scalar field in a gravitational wave background. We show that gravitational waves play a dual role in entanglement harvesting, either enhancing or suppressing the harvested entanglement depending on the system parameters. In particular, genuine tripartite entanglement exhibits a pronounced nonmonotonic response to the gravitational wave frequency, characterized by successive suppression, enhancement resembling resonance, and renewed suppression, while approaching its corresponding value in Minkowski spacetime in the regime of high frequencies. Its dependence on the detector separation is also nonmonotonic, displaying local enhancement peaks that are absent in the corresponding bipartite entanglement behavior. Compared with bipartite entanglement, genuine tripartite entanglement therefore exhibits a higher sensitivity to gravitational wave perturbations in both the frequency and spatial domains. These results suggest that genuine tripartite entanglement may provide a sensitive quantum probe of spacetime perturbations induced by gravitational waves.