Evolution of pairwise entanglement in a coupled n-body system

Abstract

We study the exact evolution of two non-interacting qubits, initially in a Bell state, in the presence of an environment, modeled by a kicked Ising spin chain. Dynamics of this model range from integrable to chaotic and we can handle numerics for a large number of qubits. We find that the entanglement (as measured by concurrence) of the two qubits has a close relation to the purity of the pair, and follows an analytic relation derived for Werner states. As a collateral result we find that an integrable environment causes quadratic decay of concurrence, while a chaotic environment causes linear decay.