We review our recent work establishing by an explicit many-body calculation for an open quantum-mechanical system of two qubits subject to independent noise modelled by bosonic baths, a newly identified connection between two important quantities in the studies of entanglement and decoherence. We demonstrate that the decay of entanglement is governed by the product of the suppression factors describing decoherence of the subsystems (qubits). This result is a detailed model calculation proving an important and intuitively natural physical property that separated open quantum systems can evolve coherently, quantum mechanically on time scales larger than the times for which they remain entangled. Our result also suggests avenues for future work. Specifically, for multiqubit systems, it is expected that similar arguments should apply "by induction." This will stimulate research to develop appropriate quantitative measures of entanglement, and attempts to quantify entanglement and decoherence in a unified way. We considered one "physically meaningful" measure of two-qubit entanglement, the concurrence. In future research, it would be of interest to obtain similar results for other measures of entanglement as well.
We review our recent work establishing by an explicit many-body calculation for an open quantum-mechanical system of two qubits subject to independent noise modelled by bosonic baths, a newly identified connection between two important quantities in the studies of entanglement and decoherence. We demonstrate that the decay of entanglement is governed by the product of the suppression factors describing decoherence of the subsystems (qubits). This result is a detailed model calculation proving an important and intuitively natural physical property that separated open quantum systems can evolve coherently, quantum mechanically on time scales larger than the times for which they remain entangled. Our result also suggests avenues for future work. Specifically, for multiqubit systems, it is expected that similar arguments should apply "by induction." This will stimulate research to develop appropriate quantitative measures of entanglement, and attempts to quantify entanglement and decoherence in a unified way. We considered one "physically meaningful" measure of two-qubit entanglement, the concurrence. In future research, it would be of interest to obtain similar results for other measures of entanglement as well.
For a solvable pure-decoherence model, we confirm by an explicit model calculation that the decay of entanglement of two two-state systems (two qubits) is approximately governed by the product of the suppression factors describing decoherence of the subsystems, provided that they are subject to uncorrelated sources of quantum noise. This demonstrates an important physical property that separated open quantum systems can evolve quantum mechanically on time scales larger than the times for which they remain entangled.
One of the greatest challenges in the fields of quantum information processing and quantum technologies is the detailed coherent control over each and every constituent of quantum systems with an ever increasing number of particles. Within this endeavor, harnessing of many-body entanglement against the detrimental effects of the environment is a major pressing issue. Besides being an important concept from a fundamental standpoint, entanglement has been recognized as a crucial resource for quantum speed-ups or performance enhancements over classical methods. Understanding and controlling many-body entanglement in open systems may have strong implications in quantum computing, quantum simulations of many-body systems, secure quantum communication or cryptography, quantum metrology, our understanding of the quantum-to-classical transition, and other important questions of quantum foundations. In this paper we present an overview of recent theoretical and experimental efforts to underpin the dynamics of entanglement under the influence of noise. Entanglement is thus taken as a dynamic quantity on its own, and we survey how it evolves due to the unavoidable interaction of the entangled system with its surroundings. We analyze several scenarios, corresponding to different families of states and environments, which render a very rich diversity of dynamical behaviors. In contrast to single-particle quantities, like populations and coherences, which typically vanish only asymptotically in time, entanglement may disappear at a finite time. In addition, important classes of entanglement display an exponential decay with the number of particles when subject to local noise, which poses yet another threat to the already-challenging scaling of quantum technologies. Other classes, however, turn out to be extremely robust against local noise. Theoretical results and recent experiments regarding the difference between local and global decoherence are summarized. Control and robustness- enhancement techniques, scaling laws, statistical and geometrical aspects of multipartite-entanglement decay are also reviewed; all in order to give a broad picture of entanglement dynamics in open quantum systems addressed to both theorists and experimentalists inside and outside the field of quantum information.
One of the greatest challenges in the fields of quantum information processing and quantum technologies is the detailed coherent control over each and every constituent of quantum systems with an ever increasing number of particles. Within this endeavor, harnessing of many-body entanglement against the detrimental effects of the environment is a major pressing issue. Besides being an important concept from a fundamental standpoint, entanglement has been recognized as a crucial resource for quantum speed-ups or performance enhancements over classical methods. Understanding and controlling many-body entanglement in open systems may have strong implications in quantum computing, quantum simulations of many-body systems, secure quantum communication or cryptography, quantum metrology, our understanding of the quantum-to-classical transition, and other important questions of quantum foundations.In this paper we present an overview of recent theoretical and experimental efforts to underpin the dynamics of entanglement under the influence of noise. Entanglement is thus taken as a dynamic quantity on its own, and we survey how it evolves due to the unavoidable interaction of the entangled system with its surroundings. We analyze several scenarios, corresponding to different families of states and environments, which render a very rich diversity of dynamical behaviors.In contrast to single-particle quantities, like populations and coherences, which typically vanish only asymptotically in time, entanglement may disappear at a finite time. In addition, important classes of entanglement display an exponential decay with the number of particles when subject to local noise, which poses yet another threat to the already-challenging scaling of quantum technologies. Other classes, however, turn out to be extremely robust against local noise. Theoretical results and recent experiments regarding the difference between local and global decoherence are summarized. Control and robustness-enhancement techniques, scaling laws, statistical and geometrical aspects of multipartite-entanglement decay are also reviewed; all in order to give a broad picture of entanglement dynamics in open quantum systems addressed to both theorists and experimentalists inside and outside the field of quantum information.
We study decoherence of one, two, and n non-interacting qubits. Decoherence, measured in terms of purity, is calculated in linear response approximation, making use of the spectator configuration. The environment and its interaction with the qubits are modelled by random matrices. For two qubits, numerical studies reveal a simple one to one correspondence between its decoherence and its internal entanglement decay. Using this relation we are able to give a formula for concurrence decay. For large environments the evolution induces a unital channel in the two qubits, providing a partial explanation for the relation above. Using a kicked Ising spin network, we study the exact evolution of two non-interacting qubits in the presence of a spin bath. We find that the entanglement (as measured by concurrence) of the two qubits has a close relation to the purity of the pair, and closely follows an analytic relation derived for Werner states. As a collateral result we find that an integrable environment causes quadratic decay of concurrence as well as of purity, while a chaotic environment causes linear decay. Both quantities display recurrences in some integrable environments. Good agreement with the results found using random matrix theory is obtained. Finally, we analyze decoherence of a quantum register in the absence of non-local operations. The problem is solved in terms of a sum rule which implies linear scaling in the number of qubits. Each term involves a single qubit and its entanglement with the remaining ones. Two conditions are essential: decoherence must be small and the coupling of different qubits must be uncorrelated in the interaction picture. We apply the result to the random matrix model, and illustrate its reach considering a GHZ state coupled to a spin bath.
Decoherence and disentanglement are phenomena central to quantum mechanics. Here, we consider the relative rates of decoherence and disentanglement in two‐qubit, three‐qubit, and two‐qutrit systems when subject to pure dephasing noise alone, and a very recent result for d×d systems. Of particular interest is the specific counterintuitive effect related to the nonadditivity of such weak noises, known as Entanglement Sudden Death (ESD), in which the entanglement of a composite quantum system goes abruptly to zero in finite time, coherence only exponentially decaying. We discuss these results in the context of the foundations of quantum mechanics.
The study of entanglement has gained prominence in recent years due to the advent of fields such as Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Theory — advances that have harnessed such counter-intuitive quantum phenomena into elements of everyday life, improving it in the process. Ideal quantum systems, “closed” to the outside world, remain quantum forever and thus manage to retain entanglement. Real quantum systems, however, are “open” to the environment and are therefore susceptible to the phenomenon of decoherence. The resultant loss of entanglement is a major hindrance to the effectiveness of quantum information tasks. In this thesis we have studied the evolution of entanglement in various types of open quantum systems (OQS) coupled in various ways to local baths. We have also studied existing ways and means of controlling the decay of entanglement and have proposed a new method of doing so. We have studied the evolution of entanglement in OQS undergoing Markovian dynamics by using the Lindblad master equation as well as the method of quantum trajectories. We have analyzed the onset of the phenomenon of entanglement sudden death in finite as well as infinite dimensional OQS, connected either locally to a thermal bath or its squeezed variant, or via a quantum non-demolition-type (QND-type) interaction to a local thermal bath. We have found that the QND-type system-bath interaction works best to conserve entanglement in finite dimensional systems, whereas a squeezed thermal bath causes entanglement sudden death even at zero temperature. We have also studied some well-known methods of controlling decoherence in open systems with respect to their ability of preserving entanglement. Some of these procedures include coupling the system to a thermal bath of photonic crystals where the photonic band gap suppresses decoherence, modulation of the systembath frequency in an attempt to contain decoherence, using the method of resonance fluorescence where an external field modulates the transition frequency of the two-qubit systems with each qubit being a two-state atomic system to contain decoherence, and using high-frequency radio waves to decouple the system and bath dynamically and thus reducing decoherence. Our study has revealed a rather startling fact — some of these decoherence control procedures actually result in an elevated rate of loss and a resultant quicker death of entanglement. This is a 6 surprising and extremely counter-intuitive result. Finally, we have proposed a new method of shielding the entanglement in the system from dissipative environmental effects. In this procedure, an ancillary system in a fixed initial state is allowed to interact with the main system through exchange interactions. We have, through numerical computation, showed that an ancilla in the ground state extends the lifespan of entanglement in the main system. Increasing the size of the ancilla, that is, increasing the value of n in an n-qubit ancilla slows down entanglement loss for a two-qubit system connected locally to a thermal bath.