Impossibility of bosonic autonomous entanglement engines in the weak-coupling limit

TL;DR

This paper proves that in the weak-coupling limit, steady states of infinite-dimensional bosonic systems cannot be entangled, regardless of interaction strength or thermal bath temperatures.

Contribution

It demonstrates that bosonic systems with excitation-number-preserving interactions weakly coupled to thermal baths cannot sustain entanglement in steady state.

Findings

Steady states are always separable in the considered setting.

Entanglement cannot be generated or stabilized in these bosonic systems under weak coupling.

The result holds for arbitrary interaction strength and temperature differences.

Abstract

Entanglement is a fundamental feature of quantum physics and a key resource for quantum communication, computing and sensing. Entangled states are fragile and maintaining coherence is a central challenge in quantum information processing. Nevertheless, entanglement can be generated and stabilised through dissipative processes. In fact, entanglement has been shown to exist in the steady state of certain interacting quantum systems subject solely to incoherent coupling to thermal baths. This has been demonstrated in a range of bi- and multipartite settings using systems of finite dimension. Here we focus on the steady state of infinite-dimensional bosonic systems. Specifically, we consider any set of bosonic modes undergoing excitation-number-preserving interactions of arbitrary strength and divided between an arbitrary number of parties that each couple weakly to thermal baths at different temperatures. We show that a unique steady state is always separable.