A Peculiar Tripartite Entangled State

We present a scheme to prepare two-atom Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen states and three-atom entangled states via cavity quantum electrodynamics, and it can be realized experimentally. Importantly, we find that in the set of tripartite entangled states prepared by our scheme there is a peculiar tripartite entangled state except the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state. The peculiar tripartite entangled states have double feature of the GHZ state (i.e. τ₁₂₃ > 0) and W state (i.e. the remaining reduce density matrices ρ_ij retain entanglement according to the positive partial transformation (PPT) criterion) simultaneously. However, its entanglement properties are not completely identical either to the GHZ state or to the W state. It is interesting that for peculiar entanglement properties, the remaining reduced density matrices ρ_ij can retain entaglement or disentanglement independently, which can be chosen freely according to our need.