We demonstrate how near-perfect entanglement (in fact arbitrarily close to maximal entanglement) can be generated between the end spins of an antiferromagnetic isotropic Heisenberg chain of length
N, starting from the ground state in the
N/2 excitation subspace, by applying a magnetic field along a given direction, acting on a single spin only. Temporally optimal magnetic fields to generate a singlet pair between the two end spins of the chain are calculated for chains up to length
20 using optimal control theory. The optimal fields are shown to remain effective in various nonideal situations including thermal fluctuations, magnetic field leakage, random system couplings, and decoherence. Furthermore, the quality of the entanglement generated can be substantially improved by taking these imperfections into account in the optimization. In particular, the optimal pulse of a given thermal initial state is also optimal for any other initial thermal state with lower temperature.
We study the dynamics of a single excitation in a Heisenberg spin-chain subjected to a sequence of periodic pulses from an external, parabolic, magnetic field. We show that, for experimentally reasonable parameters, a pair of counterpropagating coherent states is ejected from the center of the chain. We find an illuminating correspondence with the quantum time evolution of the well-known paradigm of quantum chaos, the quantum kicked rotor. From this we can analyze the entanglement production and interpret the ejected coherent states as a manifestation of the so-called "accelerator modes" of a classically chaotic system.