Sudden death of effective entanglement

TL;DR

This paper investigates how limited measurement capabilities can lead to the apparent sudden death of effective entanglement in quantum systems, even when physical entanglement persists, with implications for quantum process analysis.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of effective entanglement under measurement constraints and demonstrates its sudden death in a two quantum dot system, highlighting scenarios where physical entanglement remains.

Findings

Effective entanglement can abruptly vanish due to measurement limitations.

Sudden death of effective entanglement can occur even when physical entanglement persists.

Analysis principles apply to quantum process tomography scenarios.

Abstract

Sudden death of entanglement is a well-known effect resulting from the finite volume of separable states. We study the case when the observer has a limited measurement capability and analyse the effective entanglement, i.e. entanglement minimized over the output data. We show that in the well defined system of two quantum dots monitored by single electron transistors, one may observe a sudden death of effective entanglement when real, physical entanglement is still alive. For certain measurement setups, this occurs even for initial states for which sudden death of physical entanglement is not possible at all. The principles of the analysis may be applied to other analogous scenarios, such as etimation of the parameters arising from quantum process tomography.