LAUSR

Quantum entanglement is one of the most important resources in quantum information. In recent years, the research of quantum entanglement mainly focused on the increase in the number of entangled qubits or the high-dimensional entanglement of two particles. Compared with qubit states, multipartite high-dimensional entangled states have beneficial properties and are powerful for constructing quantum networks. However, there are few studies on multipartite high-dimensional quantum entanglement due to the difficulty of creating such states. In this paper, we experimentally prepared a multipartite high-dimensional state $$\left|{\Psi }_{442}\right\rangle =\frac{1}{2}(\left|000\right\rangle +\left|110\right\rangle +\left|221\right\rangle +\left|331\right\rangle )$$ Ψ 442 = 1 2 ( 000 + 110 + 221 + 331 ) by using the path mode of photons. We obtain the fidelity F  = 0.854 ± 0.007 of the quantum state, which proves a real multipartite high-dimensional entangled state. Finally, we use this quantum state to demonstrate a layered quantum network in principle. Our work highlights another route toward complex quantum networks.