The entanglement in a general Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain of arbitrary spin-
s is investigated. The entanglement is witnessed by the thermal energy which equals the minimum energy of any separable state. There is a characteristic temperature below that an entangled thermal state exists. The characteristic temperature for thermal entanglement is increased with spin
s. When the total number of lattice is increased, the characteristic temperature decreases and then approaches a constant. This effect shows that the thermal entanglement can be detected in a real solid state system of larger number of lattices for finite temperature. The comparison of negativity and entanglement witness is obtained from the separability of the unentangled states. It is found that the thermal energy provides a sufficient condition for the existence of the thermal entanglement in a spin-
s antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain.
Thermal entanglement of a two-qubit Heisenberg chain in the presence of the Dzyaloshinski-Moriya (DM) anisotropic antisymmetric interaction and entanglement teleportation when using two independent Heisenberg chains as the quantum channel are investigated. It is found that the DM interaction can excite entanglement and teleportation fidelity. The output entanglement increases linearly with increasing value of the input; its dependences on the temperature, DM interaction, and spin coupling constant are given in detail. Entanglement teleportation will be better realized via an antiferromagnetic spin chain when the DM interaction is turned off and the temperature is low. However, the introduction of the DM interaction can cause the ferromagnetic spin chain to be a better quantum channel for teleportation. A minimal entanglement of the thermal state in the model is needed to realize the entanglement teleportation regardless of whether the spin chains are antiferromagnetic or ferromagnetic.
Recent numerical results showed that spin chains are able to produce long-distance entanglement (LDE). We develop a formalism that allows the computation of LDE for weakly interacting probes with gapped many-body systems. At zero temperature, a dc response function determines the ability of the physical system to generate genuine quantum correlations between the probes. We show that the biquadratic Heisenberg spin-1 chain is able to produce LDE in the thermodynamic limit and that the finite antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain maximally entangles two spin-
1/2 probes very far apart. These results support the current perspective of using quantum spin chains as entanglers or quantum channels in quantum information devices.