Linear optics quantum logic operations enabled the observation of a four-photon cluster state. We prove genuine four-partite entanglement and study its persistency, demonstrating remarkable differences to the usual GHZ state. Efficient analysis tools are introduced in the experiment, which will be of great importance in further studies on multi-particle entangled states. Multipartite entangled states play a fundamental role in the field of quantum information theory and its applications. Recently, special types of entangled multiqubit states, the so-called graph states, have moved into the center of interest [1]. Due to the fact that they can be generated by next-neighbor interactions, these states occur naturally in solid state systems or can be easily obtained in experiments on atomic lattices [2]. These graph states are basic elements of various quantum error correcting codes [3] and multi-party quantum communication protocols [4]. Well known members of this family of states are the GHZ and cluster states. The latter received a lot of attention in the context of the so-called one-way quantum computer scheme suggested by Briegel and Raussendorf [5]. There, the cluster state serves as the initial resource of a universal computation scheme based on single-qubit operations only. Very recently the principal feasibility of this approach was experimentally demonstrated for a four-photon cluster state [6].In this letter we report the experimental detection of a high fidelity four-photon cluster state. The inherent stability of the linear optics phase gate implemented here allowed a detailed characterization of the states entanglement properties as well as of its entanglement persistency under loss of qubits. Introducing stabilizer formalism [7] for the experimental analysis we were able to detect genuine four partite entanglement and to determine the states fidelity with a minimum number of measurements.The four-qubit cluster state can be written in the formwhere | H i and | V i denote linear horizontal (H) and vertical (V) polarization of a photon in the spatial mode i (i = a, b, c, d). If one compares this state with the product of two Bell states, one observes that the states are equal up to a phase factor of the last term. This phase can be generated by a controlled phase (C-Phase) gate acting on input modes This scheme directly reflects the generation principle of graph states: evidently, the state | Φ + can be generated by next-neighbor interaction, and the four-qubit cluster state is then obtained by a third interaction between the neighboring qubits b ′ and c ′ .