Dark periods and revivals of entanglement in a two qubit system

Abstract

In a recent paper Yu and Eberly [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 93}, 140404 (2004)] have shown that two initially entangled and afterwards not interacting qubits can become completely disentangled in a finite time. We study transient entanglement between two qubits coupled collectively to a multimode vacuum field and find an unusual feature that the irreversible spontaneous decay can lead to a revival of the entanglement that has already been destroyed. The results show that this feature is independent of the coherent dipole-dipole interaction between the atoms but it depends critically on whether or not the collective damping is present. We show that the ability of the system to revival entanglement via spontaneous emission relies on the presence of very different timescales for the evolution of the populations of the collective states and coherence between them.