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Distillability Sudden Birth of Entanglement for Qutrit-Qutrit Systems

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2014 Chinese Phys. Lett. 31 110301

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 CHIN. PHYS. LETT. Vol. 31, No. 11 (2014) 110301

Distillability Sudden Birth of Entanglement for Qutrit-Qutrit Systems

Mazhar Ali1** , HUANG Jiang(黄江)2
1
Department of Electrical Engineering, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad 22060, Pakistan
2
Department of Physical and Photoelectric Science, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang 524088

(Received 25 July 2014)

We report the sudden appearance of distillability between two statistically independent reservoirs modelled as
qutrit-qutrit systems. This feature of bipartite quantum systems is different from the previously observed phe-
nomenon of entanglement sudden birth. It is found that the states of reservoirs first become bound entangled,
thus exhibiting entanglement sudden birth, consequently followed by the sudden birth of distillability, and it is
shown that whenever distillability is lost abruptly from principal system, it also necessarily appears abruptly
among reservoirs’ degrees of freedom. This surprising observation reflects yet another peculiarity of dynamical
aspects of quantum entanglement.

PACS: 03.65.Yz, 03.65.Ud, 03.67.Mn DOI: 10.1088/0256-307X/31/11/110301

Quantum entanglement finds its role in several
practical applications, which are devised to harness
the power of quantum physics. This technologi-
cal aspect of entanglement has attracted several re-
searchers to develop its characterization, quantifica-
tion, optimal detection in theory and experiments,
and the methods to reverse the inevitable process
of decoherence.[1,2] It is a great challenge to coher-
ently control the constituents of a multipartite quan-
tum system, as in experiments where the effects
of decoherence may degrade entanglement severely.
The study of the effects of noisy environments on
entanglement is an active area of research.[3] The
dynamics of entanglement under various environ-
ments were studied for both bipartite and multipartite
systems.[4−17] It was found that entanglement decay
may not always be exponential and even for Marko-
vian processes, there are instances where entangle-
ment may vanish at finite times well before coher-
ences disappear. Such a situation has been called
sudden death of entanglement (ESD). Moreover, it
was shown that certain free-entangled (distillable)
states of qutrit-qutrit systems may become bound-
entangled (non-distillable) in a finite time under the
influence of either multi-local decoherence[18] and/or
under a combination of collective and local dephasing
processes.[19] Such behavior has been named as dis-
tillability sudden death (DSD).[18] This phenomenon
was later also studied for qutrit-qutrit systems in-
teracting with zero-temperature reservoirs,[20] ther-
mal reservoirs[21,22] and under depolarizing noise.[23]
In particular, it was shown that whenever there is
ESD[4] in the principal system, there is always a cor-
responding entanglement sudden birth (ESB) among
reservoirs.[12] With these previous findings in mind, we
raise and answer the following question. For a given
initial state that undergoes distillability sudden death
(DSD), is there any corresponding distillability sudden
birth (DSB) among reservoirs? In this Letter, we af-
firm this question by explicitly demonstrating that for
a family of quantum states, distillability sudden death
necessarily implies distillability sudden birth and vice
versa. We consider the system of a cavity-reservoir
to show this peculiar feature of dynamics of entangle-
ment.
Let us first consider a qubit as two uncoupled cav-
ity modes with up to one photon. Each mode is in-
teracting independently with its own reservoir. The
Hamiltonian describing the interaction between a sin-
gle cavity mode and an 𝑁 -mode reservoir is given
by[12]
𝑁 𝑁
𝑎† 𝑎 𝜔𝑘 ˆ𝑏†ˆ𝑏 + ~ 𝑎ˆ𝑏†𝑘 + ˆ𝑏𝑘 𝑎
ˆ† ).
∑︁ ∑︁
ˆ = ~𝜔ˆ
𝐻 ˆ+~ 𝑔𝑘 (ˆ
𝑘=1 𝑘=1 (1)
The first term describes the single cavity mode, the
second term is for the 𝑁 -mode reservoir, and the
third term describes the interaction between cavity
and reservoir. As we are interested in a situation
where a cavity mode contains only a single photon
and its corresponding reservoir is in vacuum mode,
therefore, the combined state before the interaction
can be written as
|𝜓(0)⟩CR = |1⟩C ⊗ |0̄⟩R , (2)
where |0̄⟩R = Π𝑁
𝑘=1 |0𝑘 ⟩Ris the collective vacuum state
of 𝑁 -modes of reservoir R. The time evolution of this
state using Hamiltonian Eq. (1) leads to
𝑁
∑︁
|𝜓(𝑡)⟩CR = 𝜉(𝑡)|1⟩C |0̄⟩R + 𝜆𝑘 (𝑡)|0⟩C |1𝑘 ⟩R ,
𝑘=1 (3)
where the reservoir state |1𝑘 ⟩R describes the presence
of a single photon in mode 𝑘. The probability am-
plitude 𝜉(𝑡) converges to 𝜉(𝑡) = 𝑒−𝜅𝑡/2 in the limit of

** Corresponding author. Email: mazharaliawan@yahoo.com

© 2014 Chinese Physical Society and IOP Publishing Ltd

110301-1
 CHIN. PHYS. LETT. Vol. 31, No. 11 (2014) 110301

large 𝑁 , i.e., 𝑁 → ∞. Equation (3) can be written as time-evolved quantum states of the principal system
and its reservoirs.
|𝜓(𝑡)⟩CR = 𝜉(𝑡)|1⟩C |0̄⟩R + 𝜒(𝑡)|0⟩C |1̄⟩R , (4) We consider a specific family of quantum states
∑︀𝑁 given as
where |1̄⟩R = (1/𝜒(𝑡)) 𝑘=1 𝜆𝑘 (𝑡)|1𝑘 ⟩, and√the prob-
ability amplitude 𝜒(𝑡) converges to 𝜒(𝑡) = 1 − 𝑒−𝜅𝑡 2 𝛼 5−𝛼
𝜌𝛼 = |Ψ+ ⟩⟨Ψ+ | + 𝜎+ + 𝜎− , (7)
for large 𝑁 . Equation (4) describes an effective two- 7 7 7
qubit system.[12] Similarly, for the cavity qutrit states, where 2 ≤ 𝛼 ≤ 5. In √ Eq. (7), the maximally en-
the evolution of a single cavity mode, initially in a two- tangled state |Ψ+ ⟩ = 1/ 3(|0, 1⟩ + |1, 0⟩ + |2, 2⟩) is
photon state with the reservoir in the vacuum state, mixed with the separable states 𝜎+ = 1/3(|0, 0⟩⟨0, 0|+
that is, |𝜑(2) (0)⟩ = |2⟩C ⊗ |0̄⟩R , is given as |1, 2⟩⟨1, 2| + |2, 1⟩⟨2, 1|) and 𝜎− = 1/3(|1, 1⟩⟨1, 1| +
√ |2, 0⟩⟨2, 0| + |0, 2⟩⟨0, 2|). It was shown[26] that 𝜌𝛼
|𝜑(2) (𝑡)⟩CR =𝜉 2 (𝑡)|2⟩C |0̄⟩R + 2𝜉(𝑡)𝜒(𝑡)|1⟩C |1̄⟩R
is separable for 2 ≤ 𝛼 ≤ 3, bound-entangled for
+ 𝜃(𝑡)|0⟩C |2̄⟩R , (5) 3 < 𝛼 ≤ 4, and free-entangled (NPT) for 4 < 𝛼 ≤ 5.
We take these states with 4 < 𝛼 ≤ 5. The time
where
evolution of these states and the corresponding state
𝑁 of the reservoirs can be easily obtained as discussed
1 (︁ ∑︁
|2̄⟩R = |𝜆𝑘 (𝑡)|2 |2𝑘 ⟩R earlier. We chose to work in the basis spanned by
𝜃(𝑡)
𝑘=1 {|00⟩|01⟩|02⟩|10⟩|11⟩|12⟩|20⟩|21⟩|22⟩}.
𝑁
√ ∑︁ )︁
+ 2 𝜆𝑘 (𝑡)𝜆𝑞 (𝑡)|1𝑘 . . . 1𝑞 ⟩R , 0.20
α/⊲
𝑘̸=𝑞=1 (6)
√︀ 0.15
and 𝜃(𝑡) = 1 − 𝜉 4 (𝑡) − 2𝜉 2 (𝑡)𝜒2 (𝑡). Using Eqs. (4)
|ρR|-1
and (5) for an arbitrary initial state of a qutrit-qutrit 0.10

system, one can determine the time evolved collec-

tive state for the cavities-reservoirs system. To obtain 0.05

the time evolved state of cavities (reservoirs) only, we N↼ρ↽

κtN κtR
take a partial trace over reservoirs’ (cavities) degrees 0.00
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.10 0.12
of freedom. κt
It was shown that a quantum state with a positive Fig. 1.The negativity and realignment criterion plotted
partial transpose (PPT) is not distillable.[1] The PPT- for cavities against the decay parameter 𝜅𝑡 for 𝛼 = 4.2.
entangled states are called bound entangled. The
states with negative partial transpose (NPT) are re- α/⊲

garded as distillable. Conjecture exists on the possi- 0.15

bility of NPT-bound entangled (NPT-non-distillable)
|σR|-1
states,[24] however, the evidence is not conclusive. 0.10
In general, there is not a unique criterion to de-
tect bound entangled states, however, the realign- 0.05
ment criterion[25] is powerful in some cases and not
N↼σ↽
hard to compute for an arbitrary quantum state. The 0.00
κtR κtN

realignment of a given density matrix is defined as 0 2 4 6 8

(𝜌R )𝑖𝑗,𝑘𝑙 = 𝜌𝑖𝑘,𝑗𝑙 . For a separable state, it holds that
‖𝜌R ‖ ≤ 1. For a PPT-state, the positive value of
the quantity ‖𝜌R ‖ − 1 can prove the bound-entangled
state.
To characterize a state being NPT, we need to
determine the time evolution of negativity.[27] For a
positive value of this measure, the state will be NPT
(hence distillable), whereas when this measure is zero,
the state is PPT and we cannot conclude the entan-
glement or separability of the state until some other
measures/steps reveal the status of the state. The neg-
ativity 𝑁 (𝜌) is equal to the absolute value of the sum
of negative eigenvalues of partial transpose of a state
𝜌. In combination of negativity and realignment cri-
terion, we can investigate the distillability property of
110301-2
κt
Fig. 2.The negativity and realignment criterion plotted
for reservoirs against the decay parameter 𝜅𝑡 for 𝛼 = 4.2.
Figure 1 shows the negativity 𝑁 (𝜌𝛼 ) and realign-
ment criterion ‖𝜌R 𝛼 (𝑡)‖ − 1 plotted against decay pa-
rameter 𝜅𝑡 with an initial choice of parameter 𝛼 = 4.2.
It can be seen that an initial NPT (distillable) state
becomes PPT (non-distillable) at a finite time 𝜅𝑡N ≈
0.032. The entanglement of the subsequent PPT-state
is verified by the positive value of ‖𝜌R (𝑡)‖ − 1 in the
range 0.032 ≤ 𝜅𝑡 ≤ 0.118. However, the realignment
criterion fails to detect the possible entanglement af-
ter time 𝜅𝑡R ≈ 0.118, if any. We cannot comment
with certainty about the entanglement properties of
the state after this point. We have demonstrated that
 CHIN. PHYS. LETT. Vol. 31, No. 11 (2014) 110301
initially distillable states of the cavities exhibit distil-
lability sudden death for cavity-reservoir systems as
well.
At this stage, we can explore the idea, i.e., what
happens to the distillability properties of the reser-
voirs after there is corresponding sudden death of dis-
tillability in cavity qutrits. Figure 2 depicts the time
evolution of negativity and realignment criterion for
the corresponding density matrix 𝜎(𝑡) of reservoirs,
against the decay parameter 𝜅𝑡 with the same choice
𝛼 = 4.2. Interestingly, we observe that the reservoirs
first become bound-entangled indicated by a positive
value of (‖𝜎 R (𝑡)‖−1) at 𝜅𝑡R ≈ 2.30. The state remains
PPT-entangled until 𝜅𝑡N ≈ 3.50, where it finally be-
comes NPT (distillable). This means that reservoirs
first exhibit entanglement sudden birth and after that,
they exhibit sudden birth of distillability (DSB). Once
again, we remark that we cannot comment on the en-
tanglement properties of a time evolved state just be-
fore 𝜅𝑡𝑅 ≈ 2.30. It is interesting to note that cavi-
ties lost their distillability much earlier, whereas the
reservoirs first become PPT-entangled and then NPT-
entangled. Of course, at 𝑡 = ∞, the complete state of
cavities 𝜌𝛼 transfers to the reservoirs.
0.20
α/⊲
0.15
~R|-1
|ρ
0.10
0.05
~
N↼ρ↽
0.00
κtN
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.10
κt
Fig. 3. The negativity and realignment criterion plotted
for an initial cavities state 𝜌˜𝛼 against the decay parameter
𝜅𝑡 for 𝛼 = 4.25.
Next we consider the locally equivalent state 𝜌˜𝛼 ,
which may be obtained from Eq. (7) by applying the
local unitary operation 𝑈 = 𝐼3 ⊗ 𝜃, with 𝜃 = |0⟩⟨1| +
|1⟩⟨0| + |2⟩⟨2|. As a result of this operation, we obtain
2 𝛼 5−𝛼
𝜌˜𝛼 = 𝑈 𝜌𝛼 𝑈 † = |Ψ̃+ ⟩⟨Ψ̃+ | + 𝜎˜+ + 𝜎
˜− .
7 7 7 dynamics to the previous state.
Due to the fact that the local unitary transforma-
tions cannot convert separable states into entangled
states, the transformed separable states are 𝜎 ˜+ =
1/3(|0, 1⟩⟨0, 1| + |1, 2⟩⟨1, 2| + |2, 0⟩⟨2, 0|), and 𝜎 ˜− =
1/3(|1, 0⟩⟨1, 0| + |2, 1⟩⟨2, 1| + |0, 2⟩⟨0, 2|). Similarly, a
maximally entangled state is also converted √ into an-
other maximally entangled state |Ψ̃+ ⟩ = 1/ 3(|0, 0⟩+
|1, 1⟩ + |2, 2⟩). The local unitary transformations pre-
serve the trace and static entanglement of an initial
quantum state, however, they may change the dynam-
ics of entanglement significantly.[13]
In Fig. 3, we plot the negativity and realignment
criterion for quantum state 𝜌˜𝛼 , against the decay pa-
rameter 𝜅𝑡 with a choice of 𝛼 = 4.25. We observe that
once again, the states lose their distillability suddenly
at 𝜅𝑡 ≈ 0.044 as the negativity becomes zero; nev-
ertheless, the subsequent PPT-states are still entan-
gled, as indicated by the positive value of realignment
criterion (‖˜ 𝜌R (𝑡)‖ − 1) till 𝜅𝑡 ≈ 0.12, after that we
cannot ensure further entanglement properties of the
states. It is interesting to compare this situation with
that of vacuum[20] and thermal[22] reservoirs. In the
case of vacuum reservoirs, the same state does not ex-
hibit any distillability sudden death and its negativity
only decays asymptotically. For thermal reservoirs,
this state indeed exhibits distillability sudden death
even for a vanishingly small amount of mean photon
number. In the current dynamics, there actually ap-
pear some non-zero off-diagonal elements which were
zero at 𝑡 = 0 and these additional elements bring the
distillability of the states to an end in a much earlier
time.
0.20
α/⊲
0.15
~ R|-1
|σ
0.10
0.05
~
N↼σ↽
ktN
ktR
0.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
kt
Fig. 4. The negativity and realignment criterion plotted
κtR for reservoirs state 𝜎
˜ (𝑡) against the decay parameter 𝜅𝑡 for
0.12 𝛼 = 4.25.
Figure 4 shows the time evolution of negativity
and realignment criterion for the corresponding den-
sity matrix 𝜎 ˜ (𝑡) of reservoirs. We observe that once
again, the time evolved reservoir state 𝜎 ˜ (𝑡) first be-
comes bound entangled as indicated by the positive
value of (‖˜ 𝜎 R (𝑡)‖ − 1) at 𝜅𝑡𝑅 ≈ 2.19. The negativ-
ity only appears suddenly at 𝜅𝑡 ≈ 3.17. We have
seen once again the phenomenon of distillability sud-
den birth (DSB) in a state which exhibits different
(8)
In summary, we have revisited the entanglement
dynamics of qutrit-qutrit systems coupled to statis-
tically independent reservoirs. We have raised and
answered the question of distillability sudden birth
among reservoir-reservoir qutrit systems. We find that
whenever there is a distillability sudden death in the
principal system, there is always a corresponding dis-
tillability sudden birth among the reservoirs. For the
case where the negativity can decay asymptotically es-
sentially means no distillability sudden death and also
there is no related entanglement sudden death. Such
decay would make sure that there is also no sudden
110301-3
 CHIN. PHYS. LETT. Vol. 31, No. 11 (2014) 110301
appearance of entanglement among reservoirs and its
state would be NPT immediately after the interaction
starts and therefore, there will also be no distillability
sudden birth. It is interesting to note that all pre-
vious studies[18−22] of distillability sudden death were
reported for the family of quantum states (also consid-
ered in this work) with the property of the dynamical
process keeping all initial zero matrix elements as zero.
However, with the current dynamical process, there
appear some additional matrix elements which were
zero initially. This means that our dynamical pro-
cess takes us away from the initial family of quantum
states. Despite this fact, we observe the phenomenon
of distillability sudden death and consequently its sud-
den birth. We have argued that distillability sudden
death may be related only to these special quantum
states and we may not observe this phenomenon in
quantum states other than these states. Neverthe-
less, our current findings contradict that conjecture,
as we have some quantum states which are of course
in the neighborhood of the specific family of states
exhibiting this feature. We also note that no mat-
ter which trajectory is taken by the dynamics process
from start to end, the asymptotic states of reservoirs
are exactly those of the initial states. It appears that
at some instances, the flow of correlations from the
principal system to the reservoirs is a gradual process
of building correlations, first becoming bound entan-
gled and finally becoming NPT entangled and at the
end attaining exactly the same state of the principal
systems. For the case that when there is no ESD, the
reservoirs states become NPT immediately after the
interaction starts. We believe that further investiga-
tion of this phenomenon for other types of noisy envi-
ronments may bring more insight for better control of
this phenomenon.
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