Entanglement of extremal density matrices of 2-qubit Hamiltonian with Kramers degeneracy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to analyze entanglement in extremal density matrices of 2-qubit Hamiltonians, including those with Kramers degeneracy, revealing how entanglement varies with Hamiltonian parameters.

Contribution

It extends the extremal density matrix formalism to mixed states and applies it to analyze entanglement properties of 2-qubit Hamiltonians with Kramers degeneracy.

Findings

Both pure and mixed extremal states can be entangled or separable.

Time-reversal invariant Hamiltonians have extremal pure states that are not time-reversal invariant.

Among extremal mixed states, three are entangled and two are separable.

Abstract

We establish a novel procedure to analyze the entanglement properties of extremal density matrices depending on the parameters of a finite dimensional Hamiltonian. It was applied to a general 2-qubit Hamiltonian which could exhibit Kramers degeneracy. This is done through the extremal density matrix formalism, which allows to extend the conventional variational principle to mixed states. By applying the positive partial transpose criterion in terms of the Correlation and Schlienz-Mahler matrices on the extremal density matrices, we demonstrate that it is possible to reach both pure and mixed entangled states, changing properly the parameters of the Hamiltonian. For time-reversal invariant Hamiltonians, the extremal pure states can be entangled or not and we prove that they are not time-reversal invariants. For extremal mixed states we have in general 5 possible cases: three of them are entangled and the other two separable.