Qubit Mediated Time Robust Entangling of Oscillators in Thermal Environments

Abstract

We consider two separated oscillators initially in equilibrium and continuously interacting with thermal environments, and propose a way to entangle them using a mediating qubit. An appropriate interaction allows for an analytic treatment of the open system, removes the necessity of fine-tuning interaction times and results in a high tolerance of the entanglement to finite temperature. The entanglement thus produced between the oscillators can be verified either through a Bell inequality relying on oscillator parity measurements or through conditional extraction of the entanglement on to two mutually non-interacting qubits. The latter process also shows that the generated mixed entangled state of the oscillators is an useful resource for entangling qubits. By allowing for influences from environments, taking feasible qubit-oscillator interactions and measurement settings, this scheme should be implementable in a variety of experimental setups. The method presented for the solution of the master equation can also be adapted to a variety of problems involving the same form of qubit-oscillator interaction