Deterministic conversion of a four-photon GHZ state to a W state via homodyne measurement

We propose a specific method for converting a four-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state to a W state in a deterministic way by using linear optical elements, cross-Kerr nonlinearities, and homodyne measurement. We consider the effects of the quadrature homodyne measurements on the fidelity of the W state and the experimental feasibility of the proposed scheme. This might provide great prospects for converting multipartite entangled states into each other for future optical quantum information processing (QIP).