Disentanglement and Decoherence without dissipation at non-zero temperatures

Abstract

Decoherence is well understood, in contrast to disentanglement. According to common lore, irreversible coupling to a dissipative environment is the mechanism for loss of entanglement. Here, we show that, on the contrary, disentanglement can in fact occur at large enough temperatures $T$ even for vanishingly small dissipation (as we have shown previously for decoherence). However, whereas the effect of $T$ on decoherence increases exponentially with time, the effect of $T$ on disentanglement is constant for all times, reflecting a fundamental difference between the two phenomena. Also, the possibility of disentanglement at a particular $T$ increases with decreasing initial entanglement.

3 pages

References in corpus (2)

• Quantum entanglement
• Entanglement without Dissipation: A Touchstone for an exact Comparison of Entanglement Measures

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Radiation Reaction: General approach and applications, especially to electrodynamics
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