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arXiv:0804.4556 · Physical Review A

Experimental investigation of the dynamics of entanglement: Sudden death, complementarity, and continuous monitoring of the environment

A. Salles, Fernando de Melo, Marcelo Pereira de Almeida, Malena O. Hor-Meyll, Stephen Patrick Walborn, P. H. Souto Ribeiro, L. Davidovich

Published Aug 13, 2008• 251 citations
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Abstract

We report on an experimental investigation of the dynamics of entanglement between a single qubit and its environment, as well as for pairs of qubits interacting independently with individual environments, using photons obtained from parametric down-conversion. The qubits are encoded in the polarizations of single photons, while the interaction with the environment is implemented by coupling the polarization of each photon with its momentum. A convenient Sagnac interferometer allows for the implementation of several decoherence channels and for the continuous monitoring of the environment. For an initially entangled photon pair, one observes the vanishing of entanglement before coherence disappears. For a single qubit interacting with an environment, the dynamics of the complementarity relations connecting single-qubit properties and its entanglement with the environment is experimentally determined. The evolution of a single qubit under continuous monitoring of the environment is investigated, demonstrating that a qubit may decay even when the environment is found in the unexcited state. This implies that entanglement can be increased by local continuous monitoring, which is equivalent to entanglement distillation. We also present a detailed analysis of the transfer of entanglement from the two-qubit system to the two corresponding environments, between which entanglement may suddenly appear, and show instances for which no entanglement is created between dephasing environments, nor between either of them and the corresponding qubit: the initial two-qubit entanglement gets transformed into legitimate multiqubit entanglement of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger type.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.78.022322

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We report on an experimental investigation of the dynamics of entanglement between a single qubit and its environment, as well as for pairs of qubits interacting independently with individual environments, using photons obtained from parametric down-conversion. The qubits are encoded in the polarizations of single photons, while the interaction with the environment is implemented by coupling the polarization of each photon with its momentum. A convenient Sagnac interferometer allows for the implementation of several decoherence channels and for the continuous monitoring of the environment. For an initially entangled photon pair, one observes the vanishing of entanglement before coherence disappears. For a single qubit interacting with an environment, the dynamics of the complementarity relations connecting single-qubit properties and its entanglement with the environment is experimentally determined. The evolution of a single qubit under continuous monitoring of the environment is investigated, demonstrating that a qubit may decay even when the environment is found in the unexcited state. This implies that entanglement can be increased by local continuous monitoring, which is equivalent to entanglement distillation. We also present a detailed analysis of the transfer of entanglement from the two-qubit system to the two corresponding environments, between which entanglement may suddenly appear, and show instances for which no entanglement is created between dephasing environments, nor between either of them and the corresponding qubit: the initial two-qubit entanglement gets transformed into legitimate multiqubit entanglement of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger type.
When an initially entangled pair of qubits undergoes local decoherence processes, there are a number of ways in which the original entanglement can spread throughout the multipartite system consisting of the two qubits and their environments. Here, we report theoretical and experimental results regarding the dynamics of the distribution of entanglement in this system. The experiment employs an all optical setup in which the qubits are encoded in the polarization degrees of freedom of two photons, and each local decoherence channel is implemented with an interferometer that couples the polarization to the path of each photon, which acts as an environment. We monitor the dynamics and distribution of entanglement and observe the transition from bipartite to multipartite entanglement and back, and show how these transitions are intimately related to the sudden death and sudden birth of entanglement. The multipartite entanglement is further analyzed in terms of three- and four-partite entanglement contributions, and genuine four-qubit entanglement is observed at some points of the evolution.
Any quantum system inevitably interacts with its natural environment, which can be modeled as a Markovian reservoir consisting of a continuum of electromagnetic field modes. The quantum coherence of qubits in a zero-temperature natural reservoir decays asymptotically, whereas the quantum entanglement of two qubits coupled to such reservoirs may disappear in a finite time. This phenomenon, referred to as entanglement sudden death (ESD), has been simulated with artificially engineered dissipative channels, but ESD induced by natural dissipative channels has not been confirmed. We here present the first demonstration of natural-dissipation-induced ESD for two photonic qubits, each stored in a leaky resonator of a superconducting circuit. The disentanglement dynamics of the two photonic qubits is monitored with two ancilla superconducting qubits, which can be controllably coupled to the corresponding leaky resonators. The techniques developed in our experiment pave the way for experimental exploration of entanglement dynamics in natural environments.
Entanglement is a key resource in quantum information. It can be destroyed or sometimes created by interactions with a reservoir. In recent years, much attention has been devoted to the phenomena of entanglement sudden death and sudden birth, i.e., the sudden disappearance or revival of entanglement at finite times resulting from a coupling of the quantum system to its environment [1, 2, 3]. We investigate the evolution of the entanglement of noninteracting qubits coupled to reservoirs under monitoring of the reservoirs by means of continuous measurements. Because of these measurements, the qubits remain at all times in a pure state, which evolves randomly. To each measurement result (or "realization") corresponds a quantum trajectory in the Hilbert space of the qubits. We show that for two qubits coupled to independent baths subjected to local measurements, the average of the qubits' concurrence over all quantum trajectories is either constant or decays exponentially. The corresponding decay rate depends on the measurement scheme only. This result contrasts with the entanglement sudden death phenomenon exhibited by the qubits' density matrix in the absence of measurements. Our analysis applies to arbitrary quantum jump dynamics (photon counting) as well as to quantum state diffusion (homodyne or heterodyne detections) in the Markov limit. We discuss the best measurement schemes to protect the entanglement of the qubits. We also analyze the case of two qubits coupled to a common bath. Then, the average concurrence can vanish at discrete times and may coincide with the concurrence of the density matrix. The results explained in this article have been presented during the "Fifth International Workshop DICE2010" by the first author and have been the subject of a prior publication [4].
Decoherence is an unavoidable effect of the quantum system coupled to an environment, which leads to the system evolving from a pure state to a mixed one. A critical issue here is that the reduction of purity is quantum or classical, which corresponds to whether or not entanglement is generated between the system and environment. We report a proof-of-principle experimental investigation of such entanglement in a simple but paradigmatic case, in which a qubit system interacts with a pure dephasing channel. The pure dephasing process is realized in a linear photonic system, and the experiment is a validation in a very controlled setting. By adopting previous methods to detect qubit-environment entanglement, we prove that such entanglement can be detected by performing local measurements on only one subsystem, even when the other subsystem in the pair cannot be detected. Our experiment paves the way for investigating features of open quantum system dynamics.