Generation and protection of a maximally entangled state between many modes in an optical network with dissipation

We present a three-cavity network model with two modes in each cavity and a nonlinear medium that generates a Kerr-type interaction via both self-phase and cross-phase modulation processes. We have two main goals. The first one is to generate a multipartite maximally entangled state (MES), starting from the ground state of the system. We address the problem both without and with dissipation. Second, we want to protect the MES from decoherence. While studying the MES, we analyze different bipartite and multipartite entanglement measures. We also study the effect of an avoided level crossing identified by the critical behavior of the entanglement measures, thus showing that the quantum correlations act as a witness for such phenomena. Our findings provide the quantum tools to perform the operation of generation and protection of a maximally entangled state in a cavity QED environment.