Physical Review A 86, 052322 (2012)

SCI

Enhancing entanglement of two qubits undergoing independent decoherences by local pre- and postmeasurements

Zhong-Xiao Man, Yun-Jie Xia and Nguyen Ba An

We consider two entangled qubits, each of which is coupled to its own reservoir, so that their entanglement degrades with time. To enhance the qubits’ entanglement at a time during the evolution we propose a proper combination of pre- and postmeasurements to be performed locally on individual qubits. The premeasurements are weak measurements, but the postmeasurements may be either quantum measurement reversals or weak measurements again, depending on the situation at the time they are applied. Given the parameters of the initial qubits’ state, the premeasurements’ strength, and the evolution time, we establish the optimal conditions for the postmeasurements so that the qubits’ entanglement becomes the largest possible. Actually, by our scheme, less entangled qubits can evolve into more entangled ones with a finite probability, or even into a near-maximally entangled state but with a vanishingly low probability. We also examine the entanglement distribution among different pairs of subsystems involved and find out that the pairwise concurrence dynamics in our scheme differs strikingly from that in the situation without any control actions.