Decoherence and protection of entanglement of a system of three qubits driven by a classical Gaussian distributed fluctuating field

Abstract

We consider a system of three uncoupled entangled qubits undergoing a decoherence process (DP) induced by a classical environmental noise portrayed by a Gaussian distributed fluctuating field with either Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) or Gaussian (G) autocorrelation function. The impacts of such a DP on the entanglement of the qubits are analyzed in detail when they are initialized either in the GHZ- or W-type states and interact with the fluctuating field in three different scenarios namely, common, independent and mixed environment(s). We found that: (i) the way the qubits interact with the noise as well as their initial state play an important role towards the protection of entanglement; (ii) there are optimal parameters which permit to delay or totally avoid the disentanglement of the qubits; (iii) irrespective of the qubit-noise coupling (QNC) scenario and the initial prepared state considered, the OU noise is more injurious to the survivorship of entanglement than the G one. Specifically, we show that, irrespective of the QNC scenario and the character of the noise considered, the DP disentangles the qubits more quickly when they are initialized in the W-type states than in the GHZ-type one. Furthermore, we show that when the initial state of the qubits is considered to be a W-type state, the disentanglement occurs more rapidly in the common environment (CE) scenario followed by the mixed environments (MEs) scenario than in the independent environments (IEs) one. However, the situation is completely reversed when a GHZ-type state is considered.