Physical Review A
Entanglement patterns and pure quantum correlations in the Heisenberg XY model
F. B. M. dos Santos, R. M. Dias, A. M. S. Macêdo
Abstract
We investigate the possibility of the existence of different types of thermal entanglement in the two-spin Heisenberg $XY$ model, which are distinguished by the behavior of the concurrence as a function of the model parameters. Singularities in the temperature threshold for thermal entanglement and in the ground-state energy as a function of the model parameters are used to construct diagrams containing boundary lines separating the several types of thermal entanglement in the system, showing an unexpected rich structure. We discuss a procedure to extract a pure quantum component from the spin-correlation function at arbitrary temperatures, by using the explicit form of the decomposition that minimizes the concurrence, and show that it is highly sensitive to the different patterns of thermal entanglement.