The existence of correlations between the parts of a quantum system on the one hand, and entanglement between them on the other, are different properties. Yet, one intuitively would identify strong N-party correlations with N-party entanglement in an N-partite quantum state. If the local systems are qubits, this intuition is confirmed: The state with the strongest N-party correlations is the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, which does have genuine multipartite entanglement. However, for high-dimensional local systems the state with strongest N-party correlations may be a tensor product of Bell states, that is, partially separable. We show this by introducing several novel tools for handling the Bloch representation.
Maximum N-body correlations do not in general imply genuine multipartite entanglement