Enhancing the detection of natural thermal entanglement with disorder

Phys Rev Lett. 2009 Mar 13;102(10):100503. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.100503. Epub 2009 Mar 9.

Abstract

Physical systems have some degree of disorder present in them. We discuss how to treat natural, thermal entanglement in any random macroscopic system from which a thermodynamic witness bounded by a constant can be found. We propose that functional many-body perturbation theory be applied to allow either a quenched or an annealed average over the disorder to be taken. We find, when considering the example of an XX Heisenberg spin chain with a random coupling strength, that the region of natural entanglement detected by both witnesses can be enhanced by the disorder.