Detection of entanglement during pure dephasing evolutions for systems and environments of any size

TL;DR

This paper extends a scheme for detecting qubit-environment entanglement to qudit systems, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex scenarios like NV-center spin qutrits interacting with nuclear spin environments.

Contribution

The authors generalize an entanglement detection scheme from qubits to qudits, broadening its applicability to many-qubit systems and complex quantum operations.

Findings

The scheme detects entanglement in qudit-environment systems.

It is effective in realistic models like NV-center spin qutrits.

Certain entangled states remain undetected, but are less impactful on decoherence.

Abstract

W generalize the scheme for detection of qubit-environment entanglement to qudit-environment systems. This is of relevance for many-qubit systems and the quantification of the operation of quantum algorithms under the influence of external noise, since only decoherence that is not entangling in its nature can be effectively described by quantum channels and similar methods in more complicated scenarios. The generalization involves an increase of the class of entangled states which are not detected by the scheme, but the type of entanglement which cannot be detected is also least likely to qualitatively influence decoherence. We exemplify the operation of the scheme on a realistically modelled NV-center spin qutrit interacting with an environment of nuclear spins.