Entanglement-purification protocols, developed for the sake of high-fidelity communication through noisy quantum channels, are highly nonlinear quantum operations and can offer a very useful context to studies of nonlinear complex maps. Recently it was demonstrated that the feedback mechanism used in a typical purification protocol can cause the evolution dynamics of qubits to exhibit chaos [Kiss et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 100501 (2011)]. In this work we extend the investigation by considering the natural time evolution of qubits during a purification process, leading to a number of interesting findings that reflect the competition between the natural unitary evolution of qubits and nonlinear purification operations. As a result, the overall evolution dynamics of entanglement can be much richer. Possible applications are also proposed.
The dynamics of an ensemble of identically prepared two-qubit systems is investigated which is subjected to the iteratively applied measurements and conditional selection of a typical entanglement purification protocol. The resulting dynamics exhibits strong sensitivity to initial conditions. For one class of initial states two types of islands characterize the asymptotic limit. They correspond to a separable and a fully entangled two-qubit state, respectively, and their boundaries form fractal-like structures. In the presence of incoherent noise an additional stable asymptotic cycle appears.