Gaussian entanglement induced by an extended thermal environment

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a thermal environment can induce stationary Gaussian entanglement among three harmonic oscillators, revealing the effects of environment-mediated interactions and the impact of passive oscillators on entanglement.

Contribution

It provides an exact analysis of environment-induced Gaussian entanglement in multi-oscillator systems using generalized quantum Langevin equations, highlighting the role of non-Markovian dynamics.

Findings

Passive oscillators reduce two-mode entanglement.

Environment-mediated interactions are long-range and coherent at low temperatures.

Entanglement is sensitive to oscillator-environment coupling strength.

Abstract

We study stationary entanglement among three harmonic oscillators which are dipole coupled to a one-dimensional or a three-dimensional bosonic environment. The analysis of the open-system dynamics is performed with generalized quantum Langevin equations which we solve exactly in Fourier representation. The focus lies on Gaussian bipartite and tripartite entanglement induced by the highly non-Markovian interaction mediated by the environment. This environment-induced interaction represents an effective many-parties interaction with a spatial long-range feature: a main finding is that the presence of a passive oscillator is detrimental for the stationary two-mode entanglement. Furthermore, our results strongly indicate that the environment-induced entanglement mechanism corresponds to uncontrolled feedback which is predominantly coherent at low temperatures and for moderate oscillator-environment coupling as compared to the oscillator frequency.