Abstract We use the mean field method to study the dynamics of thermal entanglement and also the measurement-induced disturbance for a mixed qutrit-qubit system coupled to an environment, comprised of an Ising spin-chain with long range interactions, embedded in a transverse magnetic field. It is revealed that both quantities die down in long enough time and the fade out time is a decreasing function of temperature; however, the environmental magnetic field holds back the decoherence, and increases the fade out time; thus, providing a means to control and postpone the decoherence process. Moreover, it is observed that the discrepancy between the interaction strength of the qubit and the qutrit with the environment, substantially affects the decoherence behavior of the system.
The reduced dynamics of a single qubit or two qubits coupled to an interacting quantum spin bath modeled by an
XXZ spin chain is investigated. By using the method of a time-dependent density matrix renormalization group
(t-DMRG), we go beyond the uniform coupling central spin model and nonperturbatively evaluate the induced decoherence and entanglement. It is shown that both the decoherence and the entanglement strongly depend on the phase of the underlying spin bath. We show that in general, spin baths can induce entanglement for an initially disentangled pair of qubits. Furthermore, when the spin bath is in the ferromagnetic phase because the qubits directly couple to the order parameter, the reduced dynamics shows an oscillatory type behavior. On the other hand, only for the paramagnetic and the antiferromagnetic phases do the initially entangled states suffer from an entanglement sudden death. By calculating the concurrence, the finite disentanglement time is mapped out for all of the phases in the phase diagram of the spin bath.