Steady-state entanglement enhanced by a dissipative ancilla

Abstract

We investigate how to enhance entanglement in the steady state of interacting two-level systems. The steady state is reached by spontaneous decay of the individual systems. When we additionally couple them to a dissipative two-level ancilla with variable eigenfrequency and coupling strength, we observe a considerable enhancement effect in the entanglement of this steady state. Moreover, we see that the increased entanglement is directly connected to the selection of certain excited states via the environment disturbing the ancilla. This effect could be used in dissipative state preparation schemes as well as a testbed for decoherence models.