Disentanglement and decoherence in a pair of qutrits under dephasing noise

TL;DR

This paper investigates how entanglement and decoherence evolve in a pair of three-level atoms (qutrits) under dephasing noise, revealing that entanglement decay can be faster than decoherence in certain regimes.

Contribution

It extends previous qubit-based results to qutrits, establishing bounds on entanglement decay relative to decoherence rates under multi-local and collective dephasing noise.

Findings

Entanglement decay rate is bounded below by decoherence rates.

Entanglement can decay faster than off-diagonal elements in the density matrix.

Results generalize previous qubit-based decoherence-entanglement relations.

Abstract

We relate disentanglement and decoherence rates in a pair of three-level atoms subjected to multi-local and collective pure dephasing noise acting in a preferred basis. The bipartite entanglement decay rate, as bounded from above by the negativity, is found to be greater than or equal to the dephasing-decoherence rates characterized by the decay of off-diagonal elements in the corresponding full density matrix describing the system or the reduced density matrix describing either qutrit, extending previous results for qubit pairs subject to such noise.