Atom-atom entanglement generated at early times by two photon emission

Abstract

We analyze entanglement generation between a pair of neutral two level atoms that are initially excited in a common electromagnetic vacuum. The nonlocal correlations that appear due to the interaction with the field can become entanglement when the field state is known. We distinguish two different situations: in the first, the field remains in the vacuum state, and second two photons are present in the final state. In both cases we study the dependence of the entanglement with time and interatomic distance, at ranges related with locality issues.