The structural study of entanglement in multipartite systems is hindered by the lack of necessary and sufficient operational criteria able to discriminate among the various entanglement properties of a given mixed state. Here, we pursue a different r
oute to the study of multipartite entanglement based on the closeness of a multipartite state to the set of separable ones. In particular, we analyze multipartite diagonal symmetric N qubit states and provide the analytical expression for their Best Separable Approximation (BSA [Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2261 (1998)]), that is, their unique convex decomposition into a separable part and an entangled one with maximal weight of the separable one.
