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arXiv:1407.3996 · Physical Review Letters

Experimental Entanglement Redistribution under Decoherence Channels

G. H. Aguilar, Andrea Valdés-Hernández, L. Davidovich, Stephen Patrick Walborn, P. H. Souto Ribeiro

Published Dec 9, 2014• 51 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.113.240501

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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.
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.
The dynamics of the environment is usually experimentally inaccessible and hence ignored for open systems. Here we overcome this limitation by using an interferometric setup that allows the implementation of several decoherence channels and full access to all environmental degrees of freedom. We show that when a qubit from an entangled pair interacts with the environment, the initial bipartite entanglement gets redistributed into bipartite and genuine multipartite entanglements involving the two qubits and the environment. This is yet another trait of the subtle behavior of entangled open systems.
The occurrence of entanglement sudden death in the evolution of a bipartite system depends on both the initial state and the channel responsible for the evolution. An extreme case is that of entanglement-breaking channels, which are channels that, acting on only one of the subsystems, drives them to full disentanglement, regardless of the initial state. In general, one can find certain combinations of initial states and channels acting on one or both subsystems that can result in entanglement sudden death or not. Neither the channel nor the initial state are responsible for this effect but their combination. In this paper we show that, for two entangled qubits, when entanglement sudden death occurs, the evolution can be mapped to that of an effective entanglement-breaking channel on a modified initial state. Our results allow to anticipate which states will suffer entanglement sudden death or not for a given evolution. An experiment with polarization-entangled photons demonstrates the utility of this result in a variety of cases.
The time evolution of genuine multipartite entanglement is numerically studied in a model many-spin system decohered by a structured spin bath. It is found that multipartite entanglement can be more persistent than the bipartite entanglement and can even evolve into a specific constant under certain conditions. Besides, multipartite entanglement sudden death and sudden birth are observed. It is shown that the randomness of the coupling strength and connectivity between the spins in the environment will suppress these birth and death phenomena. Furthermore, the initial state of the central system plays a significant role in determining multipartite entanglement dynamics.
We study the entanglement dynamics of a two-qubit system, each of which is embedded into its local reservoir, and the entanglement distribution among all the bipartite subsystems including qubit-qubit, qubit-reservoir, and reservoir-reservoir. It is found that the entanglement can be stably distributed among all components and particularly it also satisfies an identity firstly given by Yonac, Yu and Eberly (J. Phys. B 40, S45 (2007)) for a double J-C model without decoherence. While the explicit distribution of the entanglement is dependent of the detail of the model, even the approximation used, the identity remains unchanged. Our unified treatment includes the previous results in the literature as special cases. The result reveals the profound nature of the entanglement and should have significant implications for quantum information processing. below) has been satisfied at any time. This may be not surprising since the double J-C model has no decoherence and any initial information can be preserved in the time evolution. However, it would be surprising if the identity is still valid in the presence of the decoherence, in which a non-equilibrium relaxation process is involved. In this paper, we show that it is indeed true for such a system consisted of two qubits locally interacting with two reser- voirs. We find that the distribution of the entanglement among the bipartite subsystems is dependent of the ex- plicit property of the environment and its coupling with the qubit. The rich dynamical behaviors obtained pre- viously in the literature can be regarded as the special cases of our present result or Markovian approximation. Particularly, we find that the entanglement can stably distribute among all the bipartite subsystems if the qubit and its environment can form a bound state and the non- Markovian effect is important. Irrespective of how dis- tributes the entanglement, it is found that the identity about the entanglement in the whole system can be sat- isfied at any time, which reveals the profound physics of the entanglement dynamics. We consider two qubits interacting with two uncorre- lated vacuum reservoirs. Due to the dynamical indepen- dence between the two local subsystems, we can firstly solve the single subsystem, then apply the result obtained to the double-qubit case. The Hamiltonian of each local subsystem is (16)