We revisist the issue of entanglement of thermal equilibrium states in composite quantum systems. The possible scenarios are exemplified in bipartite qubit/qubit and qubit/qutrit systems.
It was recently shown that entanglement in quantum systems being in a non-equilibrium state can appear at much higher temperatures than in an equilibrium state. However, any system is subject to the natural relaxation process establishing equilibrium. The work deals with the numerical study of entanglement dynamics in a dipolar coupled spin-1/2 system under the transition from a non-equilibrium state to an equilibrium state. The spin system is characterized by a two-temperature density matrix, and the process of the establishment of equilibrium is in the equalization of these temperatures. The…
We investigate spatial entanglement in a system of spinless non-interacting bosons in a one dimensional harmonic trap described by the grand canonical ensemble. We find the lower bound for the amount of spatial entanglement contained in the average state of two bosons in the trap and show that it exists for arbitrary high temperatures.
We study the change of entanglement under general linear transformation of modes in a bosonic system and determine the conditions under which entanglement can be generated under such transformation. As an example we consider the thermal entanglement between the vibrational modes of two coupled oscillators and determine the temperature above which quantum correlations are destroyed by thermal fluctuations.
We study pairwise thermal entanglement in three-qubit Heisenberg models and obtain analytic expressions for the concurrence. We find that thermal entanglement is absent from both the antiferromagnetic $XXZ$ model, and the ferromagnetic $XXZ$ model with anisotropy parameter $Δ\ge 1$. Conditions for the existence of thermal entanglement are discussed in detail, as is the role of degeneracy and the effects of magnetic fields on thermal entanglement and the quantum phase transition. Specifically, we find that the magnetic field can induce entanglement in the antiferromagnetic $XXX$ model, but cann…
The thermal entanglement of two spin-1 atoms with nonlinear couplings in optical lattices is investigated in this paper. It is found that the nonlinear couplings favor the thermal entanglement creating. The dependence of the thermal entanglement in this system on the linear coupling, the nonlinear coupling, the magnetic field and temperature is also presented. The results show that the nonlinear couplings really change the feature of the thermal entanglement in the system, increasing the nonlinear coupling constant increases the critical magnetic field and the threshold temperature.
Recently, entanglement teleportation has been investigated in Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 4236 (2000). In this paper we study entanglement teleportation via two separate thermally entangled states of two-qubit Heisenberg XX chain. We established the condition under which the parameters of the model have to satisfy in order to teleport entanglement. The necessary minimum amount of thermal entanglement for some fixed strength of exchange coupling is a function of the magnetic field and temperature.
The upper and lower bounds of entanglement of formation are given for two mode squeezed thermal state. The bounds are compared with other entanglement measure or bounds. The entanglement distillation and the relative entropy of entanglement of infinitive squeezed state are obtained at the postulation of hashing inequality.
We show that the thermal entanglement in a spin system using only magnetic susceptibility measurements is restricted to the insulator materials. We develop a generalization of the thermal entanglement witness that allows us to get information about the system entanglement with variable local spin lengths that can be used experimentally in conductor or insulator materials. As an application, we study thermal entanglement for the half-filled Hubbard model for linear, square and cubic clusters. We note that it is the itinerancy of electrons that favors the entanglement. Our results suggest a weak…
I study the three parameters bipartite quantum Gaussian state called squeezed asymmetric thermal state, calculate Gaussian entanglement of formation analytically and the up bound of relative entropy of entanglement, compare them with coherent information of the state.Based on the result obtained, one can determine the relative entropy of entanglement of the state with infinitive squeezing.
We investigate the decoherence dynamics of continuous variable entanglement as the system-environment coupling strength varies from the weak-coupling to the strong-coupling regimes. Due to the existence of localized modes in the strong-coupling regime, the system cannot approach equilibrium with its environment, which induces a nonequilibrium quantum phase transition. We analytically solve the entanglement decoherence dynamics for an arbitrary spectral density. The nonequilibrium quantum phase transition is demonstrated as the system-environment coupling strength varies for all the Ohmic-type …
We study two two-level atomic quantum systems (qubits) placed close to a body held at a temperature different from that of the surrounding walls. While at thermal equilibrium the two-qubit dynamics is characterized by not entangled steady thermal states, we show that absence of thermal equilibrium may bring to the generation of entangled steady states. Remarkably, this entanglement emerges from the two-qubit dissipative dynamic itself, without any further external action on the two qubits, suggesting a new protocol to produce and protect entanglement which is intrinsically robust to environmen…
We investigate the creation of entanglement between two quantum emitters interacting with a realistic common stationary electromagnetic field out of thermal equilibrium. In the case of two qubits we show that the absence of equilibrium allows the generation of steady entangled states, which is inaccessible at thermal equilibrium and is realized without any further external action on the two qubits. We first give a simple physical interpretation of the phenomenon in a specific case and then we report a detailed investigation on the dependence of the entanglement dynamics on the various physical…
The entanglement between two identical two-level atoms interacting with two mode thermal field through a nondegenerate two-photon process has been suggested. It has been shown that for some atomic initial state the entanglement induced by nondegenerate two-photon interaction is larger than that induced by one-photon and degenerate two-photon processes.
We investigate the thermal entanglement in two superconducting qubits for arbitrary interaction strength and ground state frequencies. We calculate the concurrence of the system to quantify the thermal entanglement. We suggest a scheme, where an external tunable coupler qubit sandwich between two superconducting qubits generates entanglement. The behavior of concurrence is analyzed for three different cases, in which we consider the effects of the temperature, the qubit-qubit effective coupling strength, and the qubit frequencies on the thermal entanglement. What deserves mentioning here is th…
The effects of initial conditions and system parameters on entanglement dynamics and asymptotic entanglement for a two-qubit anisotropic XY Heisenberg system in the presence of an inhomogeneous magnetic field and spin-orbit interaction are investigated. We suppose that each qubit interacts with a separate thermal reservoir which is held in its own temperature. The effects of the parameters of the system and environment like spin-orbit interaction and temperature difference of reservoirs are also discussed.
We study the thermal entanglement in a two-spin-qutrit system with anisotropy in the exchange coupling between two spins. We use the realignment criterion to distinguish the entangled states, and the negativity for measuring the entanglement in this system. We see that the anisotropy can provide an additional parameter for enhancing the entanglement.
We explore spin-orbit thermal entanglement in rare-earth ions, based on a witness obtained from mean energies. The entanglement temperature $T_{E}$, below which entanglement emerges, is found to be thousands of kelvin above room temperature for all light rare earths. This demonstrate the robustness to environmental fluctuations of entanglement between internal degrees of freedom of a single ion.
We investigate the entanglement properties of thermal states of the harmonic lattice in one, two and three dimensions. We establish the value of the critical temperature for entanglement between neighbouring sites and give physical reasons. Further sites are shown to be entangled only due to boundary effects. Other forms of entanglement are addressed in the second part of the paper by using the energy as witness of entanglement. We close with a comprehensive diagram showing the different phases of entanglement versus complete separability and propose techniques to swap and tune entanglement ex…
In a recent paper [M. Huber {\it et al}, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 104}, 210501 (2010)] new criteria to find out the presence of multipartite entanglement have been given. We exploit these tools in order to study thermal entanglement in a spin-star network made of three peripheral spins interacting with a central one. Genuine tripartite entanglement is found in a wide range of the relevant parameters. A comparison between predictions based on the new criteria and on the tripartite negativity is also given.
We study the effect of inhomogeneities in the magnetic field on the thermal entanglement of a two spin system. We show that in the ferromagnetic case a very small inhomogeneity is capable to produce large values of thermal entanglement. This shows that the absence of entanglement in the ferromagnetic Heisenberg system is highly unstable against inhomogeneoity of magnetic fields which is inevitably present in any solid state realization of qubits.
We study the robustness of multipartite entanglement of the ground state of the one-dimensional spin 1/2 XY model with a transverse magnetic field in the presence of thermal excitations, by investigating a threshold temperature, below which the thermal state is guaranteed to be entangled. We obtain the threshold temperature based on the geometric measure of entanglement of the ground state. The threshold temperature reflects three characteristic lines in the phase diagram of the correlation function. Our approach reveals a region where multipartite entanglement at zero temperature is high but …
Thermally stable quantum states with multipartite entanglements led by frustration are found in the antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 Heisenberg hexagon. The model has been solved exactly to obtain all analytic expressions of eigenvalues and eigenfunctions. Detection and characterizations for various types of entanglements have been carried out in terms of concurrence and entanglement witnesses based on several thermodynamic observables. Variations of entanglement properties with respect to temperature and frustration are discussed. Even though the frustration opposes the bipartite entanglement, it f…
We study multipartite entanglement in non-equilibrium quantum phase transition (NEQPT) attainable in a coherently driven atomic ensemble undergoing collective decay. The NEQPT arises in the steady state of the system as the drive field strength is varied in comparison with the decay parameter. A close connection is observed between the critical behavior and the multi-partite entanglement in the system determined via the von Neumann entropy. The derivative of the von Neumann entropy shows Lambda-type behavior typical of the second order phase transitions. We further show that the calculated bi-…
We study the entanglement distillability properties of thermal states of many-body systems. Following the ideas presented in [D.Cavalcanti et al., arxiv:0705.3762], we first discuss the appearance of bound entanglement in those systems satisfying an entanglement area law. Then, we extend these results to other topologies, not necessarily satisfying an entanglement area law. We also study whether bound entanglement survives in the macroscopic limit of an infinite number of particles.
The present work reports an experimental observation of thermal entanglement in a clusterized spin chain formed in the compound Na$_2$Cu$_5$Si$_4$O$_{14}$. The presence of entanglement was investigated through two measured quantities, an Entanglement Witness and the Entanglement of Formation, both derived from the magnetic susceptibility. It was found that pairwise entanglement exists below $ \sim 200$ K. Tripartite entanglement was also observed below $ \sim 240$ K. A theoretical study of entanglement evolution as a function of applied field and temperature is also presented.
We study the system that two atoms simultaneously interact with a single-mode thermal field via different couplings and different spontaneous emission rates when two-photon process is involved. It is found that we indeed can employ the different couplings to produce the atom-atom thermal entanglement in two-photon process. The different atomic spontaneous emission rates are also utilizable in generating thermal entanglement. We also investigate the effect of the cavity leakage. To the initial atomic state $|ee> ,$a slight leakage can relieve the restriction of interaction time and we can obtai…
We define and analyse the concept of entanglement production during the evolution of a general quantum mechanical dissipative system. While it is important to minimise entropy production in order to achieve thermodynamical efficiency, maximising the rate of change of entanglement is important in quantum information processing. Quantitative relations are obtained between entropy and entanglement productions, under specific assumptions detailed in the text. We apply these to the processes of dephasing and decay of correlations between two initially entangled qubits. Both the Master equation trea…
Entanglement charge is an operational measure to quantify nonlocalities in ensembles consisting of bipartite quantum states. Here we generalize this nonlocality measure to single bipartite quantum states. As an example, we analyze the entanglement charges of some thermal states of two-qubit systems and show how they depend on the temperature and the system parameters in an analytical way.
A spin star system consisting of three peripheral two-state systems and a central one is considered, with the peripheral spins assumed to interact with each other, as well as with the central one. It is shown that such two couplings, each one being a thermal entanglement source, can significantly compete in the formation of quantum correlations in the thermal state, to the point that they can destroy any thermal entanglement of the peripheral spins.
We address the presence of bound entanglement in strongly-interacting spin systems at thermal equilibrium. In particular, we consider thermal graph states composed of an arbitrary number of particles. We show that for a certain range of temperatures no entanglement can be extracted by means of local operations and classical communication, even though the system is still entangled. This is found by harnessing the independence of the entanglement in some bipartitions of such states with the system's size. Specific examples for one- and two-dimensional systems are given. Our results thus prove th…
A formula to evaluate the entanglement in an one-dimensional ferrimagnetic system is derived. Based on the formula, we find that the thermal entanglement in a small size spin-1/2 and spin-s ferrimagnetic chain is rather robust against temperature, and the threshold temperature may be arbitrarily high when s is sufficiently large. This intriguing result answers unambiguously a fundamental question: ``can entanglement and quantum behavior in physical systems survive at arbitrary high temperatures?"
Can entanglement and the quantum behavior in physical systems survive at arbitrary high temperatures? In this Letter we show that this is the case for a electromagnetic field mode in an optical cavity with a movable mirror in a thermal state. We also identify two different dynamical regimes of generation of entanglement separated by a critical coupling strength.
he thermal entanglement is generated by weakly interacting atoms with an isotropic spin-1 chain. The decoherence of the entanglement is mainly investigated. The effective Hamiltonian is analytically obtained by the approximation method of perturbation. The scaling behavior of the effective coupling is numerically illustrated by the exact diagonalization. It is found out that the decay of the entanglement is slow in the case of non interacting spins. The long-distance thermal entangled states can be used as the noisy channel for the achievement of the quantum teleportation.
We study the local thermal entanglement in a spin-1/2 Ising-$XXZ$ diamond structure with two impurities. In this spin chain, we have the two impurities with an isolated $XXZ$ dimer between them. We focus on the study of the thermal entanglement in this dimer. The main goal of this paper is to provide a good understanding of the effect of impurities in the entanglement of the model. This model is exactly solved by a rigorous treatment based on the transfer-matrix method. Our results show that the entanglement can be tuned by varying the impurities parameters in this system. In addition, it is s…
The thermal entanglement in a two-qubit Heisenberg \emph{XXZ} spin chain is investigated under an inhomogeneous magnetic field \emph{b}. We show that the ground-state entanglement is independent of the interaction of \emph{z}-component $J_{z}$. The thermal entanglement at the fixed temperature can be enhanced when $J_{z}$ increases. We strictly show that for any temperature \emph{T} and $J_{z}$ the entanglement is symmetric with respect to zero inhomogeneous magnetic field, and the critical inhomogeneous magnetic field $b_{c}$ is independent of $J_{z}$. The critical magnetic field $B_{c}$ incr…
We investigate the effects of nonlinear couplings and external magnetic field on the thermal entanglement in a two-spin-qutrit system by applying the concept of negativity. It is found that the nonlinear couplings favor the thermal entanglement creating. Only when the nonlinear couplings $|K|$ are larger than a certain critical value does the entanglement exist. The dependence of the thermal entanglement in this system on the magnetic field and temperature is also presented. The critical magnetic field increases with the increasing nonlinear couplings constant $|K|$. And for a fixed nonlinear …
Thermal entanglement of a two-qubit Ising chain subjected to an external magnetic field and Dzialoshinski-Moriya (DM) interaction is examined. The effect of magnetic field, strength of DM interaction and temperature are analyzed by adopting negativity of partial transpose as the measure of entanglement. It is shown that when the DM interaction along the Ising axis is considerable, thermal entanglement can be sustained for higher temperature. The usefulness of longitudinal DM interaction over the one that is perpendicular to the Ising axis, in the manipulation and control of entanglement at a f…
The entanglement in a general Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain of arbitrary spin-$s$ is investigated. The entanglement is witnessed by the thermal energy which equals to the minimum energy of any separable state. There is a characteristic temperature below that an entangled thermal state exists. The characteristic temperature for thermal entanglement is increased with spin $s$. When the total number of lattice is increased, the characteristic temperature decreases and then approaches a constant. This effect shows that the thermal entanglement can be detected in a real solid state system of l…
We investigate the entanglement between any two spins in a one dimensional Heisenberg chain as a function of temperature and the external magnetic field. We find that the entanglement in an antiferromagnetic chain can be increased by increasing the temperature or the external field. Increasing the field can also create entanglement between otherwise disentangled spins. This entanglement can be confirmed by testing Bell's inequalities involving any two spins in the solid.
Most of the work involving entanglement measurement focuses on systems that can be modeled by two interacting qubits. This is due to the fact that there are few studies presenting entanglement analytical calculations in systems with spins $s > 1/2$. In this paper we present for the first time an analytical way of calculating thermal entanglement in a dimension $2\otimes3$ Heisenberg chain through the distance between states. We use the Hilbert-Schmidt norm to obtain entanglement. The result obtained can be used to calculate entanglement in chains with spin-$1/2$ coupling with spin-$1$, such as…
A particle jumps between the nodes of a graph interacting with local spins. We show that the entanglement entropy of the particle with the spin network is related to the length of the minimum cycle basis. The structure of the thermal state is reminiscent to the string-net of spin liquids.
In order to explore the effect of external temperature $T$ in quantum correlation we compute thermal entanglement and thermal discord analytically in the Heisenberg $X$ $Y$ $Z$ model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction term ${\bm D} \cdot \left( {\bm σ}_1 \times {\bm σ}_2 \right)$. For the case of thermal entanglement it is shown that quantum phase transition occurs at $T = T_c$ due to sudden death phenomenon. For antiferromagnetic case the critical temperature $T_c$ increases with increasing $|{\bm D}|$. For ferromagnetic case, however, $T_c$ exhibits different behavior in the regions $|{\…
The stationary multipartite entanglement between three interacting harmonic oscillators subjected to decoherence is analyzed in the largely unexplored non-equilibrium strong dissipation regime. We compute the exact asymptotic Gaussian state of the system and elucidate its separability properties, qualitatively assessing the regions of the space of parameters in which fully inseparable states are generated. Interestingly, the sharing structure of bipartite entanglement is seen to degrade as dissipation increases even for very low temperatures, at which the system approaches its ground state. We…
Thermal entanglement of a two-qubit Heisenberg chain in presence of the Dzyaloshinski-Moriya (DM) anisotropic antisymmetric interaction and entanglement teleportation when using two independent Heisenberg chains as quantum channel are investigated. It is found that the DM interaction can excite the entanglement and teleportation fidelity. The output entanglement increases linearly with increasing value of input one, its dependences on the temperature, DM interaction and spin coupling constant are given in detail. Entanglement teleportation will be better realized via antiferromagnetic spin cha…
In this paper we consider the generation of a three-qubit GHZ-like thermal state by applying the entanglement swapping scheme of Zukowski {\it et al.} [Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. {\bf 755}, 91 (1995)] to three pairs of two-qubit Heisenberg XY chains. The quality of the resulting three-qubit entanglement is studied by analyzing the teleportation fidelity, when it is used as a resource in the teleportation protocol of Karlsson {\it et al.}[Phys. Rev. A {\bf 58}, 4394 (1998)]. We show that even though thermal noise in the original two-qubit states is amplified by the entanglement swapping process, we …
The evolution of entanglement for two identical two-level atoms coupled to a resonant thermal field is studied for two different families of input states. Entanglement enhancement is predicted for a well defined region of the parameter space of one of these families. The most intriguing result is the possibility of probabilistic production of maximally entangled atomic states even if the input atomic state is factorized and the corresponding output state is separable.
The concurrence of two alternate qubits in a four-qubit Heisenberg XX chain is investigated when a uniform magnetic field B is included. It is found that there is no thermal entanglement between alternate qubits if B is close to zero. Magnetic field can induce entanglement in a certain range both for the antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic cases. Near zero temperature, the entanglement undergoes two sudden changes with increasing value of the magnetic field B. This is due to the changes in the ground state. This novel property may be used as quantum entanglement switch. The anisotropy in the s…
We suggest a method of generating distillable entanglement form mixed states unitarily, by utilizing the flexibility of dimension od occupied Hilbert space. We present a model of a thermal spin state entering a beam splitter generating entanglement. It is the truncation of the state that allows for entanglement generation. The output entanglement is investigated for different temperatures and it is found that more randomness - in the form of higher temperature - is better for this set up.
We analyze conditions leading to enhancement of thermal entanglement in two-qubit XY models. The effect of including cross-product terms, besides the standard XY exchange interactions, in the presence of an external magnetic field, is investigated. We show that entanglement can be yield at elevated temperatures by tuning the orientation of the external magnetic field. The details of the intrinsic exchange interactions determine the optimal orientation.
We study an ensemble of two-level quantum systems (qubits) interacting with a common electromagnetic field in proximity of a dielectric slab whose temperature is held different from that of some far surrounding walls. We show that the dissipative dynamics of the qubits driven by this stationary and out of thermal equilibrium (OTE) field, allows the production of steady many-body entangled states, differently from the case at thermal equilibrium where steady states are always non-entangled. By studying up to ten qubits, we point out the role of symmetry in the entanglement production, which is …
Quantum teleportation, which depends on entangled states, is a fascinating subject and an important branch of quantum information processing. The present work reports the use of a dipolar spin thermal system as a quantum channel to perform quantum teleportation. Non-locality, tested by violation of Bell's inequality and thermal entanglement, measured by negativity, unquestionably show that even entangled states that do not violate Bell's inequality can be useful for teleportation.
We study characteristics of superpositions and entanglement of thermal states at high temperatures and discuss their applications to quantum information processing. We introduce thermal-state qubits and thermal-Bell states, which are a generalization of pure-state qubits and Bell states to thermal mixtures. A scheme is then presented to discriminate between the four thermal-Bell states without photon number resolving detection but with Kerr nonlinear interactions and two single-photon detectors. This enables one to perform quantum teleportation and gate operations for quantum computation with …
Quantum correlation in two-qubit spin models is investigated by use of measurement-induced disturbance [S. Luo, Phys. Rev. A, 77(2008) 022301]. Its dependences on external magnetic field, spin-spin coupling, and Dzyaloshinski-Moriya (DM) interactions are presented in detail. We also compare measurement-induced disturbance and thermal entanglement in spin models and illustrate their different characteristics.
We study the entanglement of a two-qubit one dimensional XYZ Heisenberg chain in thermal equilibrium at temperature T. We obtain an analytical expression for the entanglement of formation for this system in terms of the parameters of the Hamiltonian and T. We show that depending on the relation among the coupling constants it is possible to increase the amount of entanglement of the system increasing its anisotropy. We also show numerically that for all sets of the coupling constants entanglement is a monotonically decreasing function of the temperature T, proving that we must have at least an…
We study the entanglement generated in the steady state of two interacting qubits coupled to thermal reservoirs. We show that the amount of steady-state entanglement can be enhanced by the presence of a third thermal reservoir which is common to both qubits. Specifically, we find that entanglement can be enhanced as long as the temperature of the common reservoir is below the thermalisation temperature of the qubits, whenever a single temperature can be assigned to the steady state of the qubits in the absence of the common reservoir. Moreover, the amount of entanglement generated with the com…