Impurity effect on entanglement in an XY two-dimensional spin lattice

Abstract

We consider a finite two dimensional XY spin model. The model consists of a set of seven localized spin- 12 particles in a two dimensional triangular lattice coupled through nearest neighbor exchange interaction in presence of an external magnetic field. We study the effect of a single impurity spin coupled to its nearest neighbor through an exchange interaction J′ on the pairwise entanglement between the different spins in the lattice. We found that when the spin is located at a border site the entanglement between the impurity and its nearest neighbors increases monotonically with J′ reaching a saturation value that depends on the magnetic field strength h. On the other hand the entanglement with the next nearest spins shows a critical behavior where the entanglement increases and then decreases rapidly until it vanishes. The critical coupling value at which the entanglement vanishes increases as h increases. Studying the entanglement between two spins excluding the impurity show that while the entanglement between two spins coupled to the impurity reach a saturation value as J′ increases, it vanishes for spins not coupled to the impurity. Furthermore studying the effect of a central impurity show that the entanglement between nearest neighbor and next nearest neighbor spins reaches an asymptotic value as J′ increases. Interestingly it was demonstrated that the impurity can be used as a switch to control the entanglement between different spins in the lattice turning it on and off.