Entanglement dynamics in collision models and entanglement quilts

Abstract

We study the entanglement dynamics of a family of quantum collision models by analytically solving the pairwise concurrence for all qubit pairs. We introduce a diagrammatic method that offers an intuitive, frame-by-frame understanding of these dynamics. This allows us to monitor how a single collision affects the entanglement of the whole many-body system in some special cases. We focus on a class of models where the square of concurrence is a conserved quantity in the qubit collisions, aiding us to formulate general rules of entanglement propagation. In particular, among the multiple examples we will be showing, we identify a type of genuine multipartite entanglement, which we refer to as \textit{entanglement quilt}, where every qubit is entangled with every other qubit. We find that in some models, an entanglement quilt is hypersensitive to local excitation fluctuations: The presence of even a single excited qubit can destroy the entanglement quilts. We offer a detailed mathematical treatment on the phenomena, which can help us understand the disappearance of long-range entanglement in condensed matter systems above zero temperature. We also speculate about a possible property of the entanglement quilt: Every subsystem of it is entangled with every other subsystem.