Authors Referees APS Members |
January 2008, to be published in Physical Review A
Sudden death of entanglement at finite temperature
\noindent In this paper, we consider the decay of quantum entanglement, quantified by the concurrence, of a pair of two-level systems, each of which is interacting with a reservoir at finite temperature T. For a broad class of initially entangled states, we demonstrate that the system always becomes disentangled in a finite time i.e. ``entanglement sudden death'' (ESD) occurs. This class includes \emph{all} states which previously had been found to have long-lived entanglement in zero temperature reservoirs. Our general result is illustrated by an example. © 2008 The American Physical Society.
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