Abstract
We study the Rabi model composed of three qubits coupled to a harmonic oscillator without involving the rotating-wave approximation. We show that the ground state of the three-qubit Rabi model can be analytically treated by using the transformation method, and the transformed ground state agrees well with the exactly numerical simulation under a wide range of qubit-oscillator coupling strengths for different detunings. We use the pairwise entanglement to characterize the ground-state entanglement between any two qubits and show that it has an approximately quadratic dependence on the qubit-oscillator coupling strength. Interestingly, we find that there is no qubit-qubit entanglement for the ground state if the qubit-oscillator coupling strength is large enough.