Fully-connected three-mode squeezed vacuum: Gaussian entanglement, steering, and collective photon subtraction

Abstract

We investigate a fully-connected three-mode squeezed vacuum (FC-C3MSV) state, where all three modes are pairwise coupled through nonlinear interactions in a triangle ($K_3$) topology. Using the integration-within-ordered-product technique, we derive the normal product form of the squeezing operator and obtain the covariance matrix directly from the Bogoliubov transformation. Under symmetric coupling, the physical state is genuinely tripartite entangled for any nonzero squeezing, while the three Armstrong-type witnesses provide a finite-window sufficient experimental test; in the chain-type C3MSV only one of these witnesses is violated. We find that, despite two-mode entanglement, the fully-connected topology admits \emph{no} two-mode Gaussian steering ($\mathcal{G}^{i\to j}=0$) between any pair of physical modes; the steering resource is instead collective one-mode-versus-two steering $\mathcal{G}^{i\to jk}$, which is $\theta$-independent and grows with $r$. We analyze independent vacuum losses and obtain critical transmittances for steering survival: under full symmetric loss at $r=0.5$, one-to-two collective steering disappears at $\eta\approx0.58$, whereas reverse two-to-one collective steering survives down to $\eta\approx0.502$ and the underlying two-mode entanglement persists for all $\eta>0$. Finally, we revisit photon subtraction using a normalized phase-space derivation. A photon subtraction on a single physical mode does not generate Wigner negativity on another single mode, consistent with the absence of two-mode steering. Wigner negativity can instead be generated when Bob subtracts from the collective mode $(b+c)/\sqrt{2}$, with a loss threshold $\eta_c\approx0.667$ at $r=0.5$. These results distinguish pairwise and collective nonclassical resources in the FC-C3MSV and clarify the operational role of the complete-graph topology.