ENTANGLEMENT BREAKING CHANNELS AND ENTANGLEMENT SUDDEN DEATH

OSVALDO JIMENEZ FARIAS; CHRISTIAN T. SCHMIEGELOW; MIGUEL A. LAROTONDA; LAURA T. KNOLL; STEPHEN P. WALBORN

Pucón

Conferencia; IX RIAO/OPTILAS Conference; 2016

RIAO (Red Iberoamericana de Óptica)

The results of an experimental study of entangled systems interacting with different environments are presented. The occurrence of entanglement sudden death in the evolution of a bipartite system depends on both the initial state and the channel responsible for the evolution. An extreme case is that of entanglement breaking channels, which are channels that acting on only one of the subsystems drives them to full disentanglement, regardless of the initial state. In general, one can find certain combinations of initial states and channels acting on one or both subsystems that can result in entanglement sudden death or not. Neither the channel nor the initial state are responsible for thiseffect, but their combination. In this work we show that for two entangled qubits, when entanglement sudden death occurs, the evolution can be mapped to that of an effective entanglement breaking channel on a modified initial state. Our results allow to anticipate which states will suffer entanglement suddendeath or not for a given evolution. An experiment with polarization entangled photons demonstrates the utility of this result in a variety of cases.