Manipulating and protecting entanglement by means of spin environments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the entanglement between two qubits evolves when each interacts with a spin chain environment, revealing ways to control and protect entanglement through parameter tuning and environmental phase transitions.

Contribution

It provides exact solutions for entanglement dynamics in spin environments and demonstrates methods to freeze or induce entanglement sudden death by tuning interactions.

Findings

Entanglement can be frozen by tuning interaction parameters.

Sudden death of entanglement can be activated.

Environmental quantum phase transitions affect entanglement dynamics.

Abstract

We study the dynamical behavior of two initially entangled qubits, each locally coupled to an environment embodied by an interacting spin chain. We consider energy-exchange qubit-environment couplings resulting in a rich and highly non trivial entanglement dynamics. We obtain exact results for the time-evolution of the concurrence between the two qubits and find that, by tuning the interaction parameters, one can freeze the dynamics of entanglement, therefore inhibiting its relaxation into the spin environments, as well as activate a sudden-death phenomenon. We also discuss the effects of an environmental quantum phase transition on the features of the two-qubit entanglement dynamics.