Entanglement Sudden Death: Eberly's Work and the Limits of Local Dynamics
Abstract
Entanglement sudden death (ESD), explored through a series of works by Yu and Eberly, supports the notion of entanglement vanishing abruptly and completely at a finite time, even when the underlying open-system dynamics remain smooth. In this article, we revisit the development of ESD from bipartite origins to genuine multipartite entanglement. We first illustrate the canonical mechanism of ESD with two independently damped qubits, for which the concurrence vanishes at a finite time while populations and coherences remain nonzero. We next present our results on multipartite entanglement for generalized GHZ states under depolarization. Global and independent local depolarizing dynamics can be chosen to produce identical reduced evolution for every individual qubit, yet they yield different genuine-multipartite-entanglement sudden death times, whose ordering can reverse with the initial state. For N-qubit GHZ states, this distinction becomes asymptotically stronger since the ESD time scales as 1/N under independent local depolarization, whereas under global depolarization it approaches a finite value in the thermodynamic limit. Echoing a central lesson of Prof. Eberly's work, we report the lifetime of multipartite entanglement is not fixed by the local dynamics, but rather depends on the evolution of the joint quantum state.
Related
- Entanglement Sudden Death in Gapped Ground States
- Sharp universal death of entanglement threshold for Pauli Hamiltonians
- Birth and Death of Entanglement in Hamiltonian-Driven Quantum Games under Decoherence
- Operational Limits of Gravity-Mediated Entanglement
- Memory-Induced Limits on Entanglement Distribution
BibTeX
@misc{hegde2026entanglement,
title = {{Entanglement Sudden Death: Eberly's Work and the Limits of Local Dynamics}},
author = {Abhaya S. Hegde and Songbo Xie},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.08710},
eprint = {2610.08710},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08710},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Entanglement Sudden Death: Eberly's Work and the Limits of Local Dynamics
AU - Abhaya S. Hegde
AU - Songbo Xie
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/06
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.08710
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08710
AB - Entanglement sudden death (ESD), explored through a series of works by Yu and Eberly, supports the notion of entanglement vanishing abruptly and completely at a finite time, even when the underlying open-system dynamics remain smooth. In this article, we revisit the development of ESD from bipartite origins to genuine multipartite entanglement. We first illustrate the canonical mechanism of ESD with two independently damped qubits, for which the concurrence vanishes at a finite time while populations and coherences remain nonzero. We next present our results on multipartite entanglement for generalized GHZ states under depolarization. Global and independent local depolarizing dynamics can be chosen to produce identical reduced evolution for every individual qubit, yet they yield different genuine-multipartite-entanglement sudden death times, whose ordering can reverse with the initial state. For N-qubit GHZ states, this distinction becomes asymptotically stronger since the ESD time scales as 1/N under independent local depolarization, whereas under global depolarization it approaches a finite value in the thermodynamic limit. Echoing a central lesson of Prof. Eberly's work, we report the lifetime of multipartite entanglement is not fixed by the local dynamics, but rather depends on the evolution of the joint quantum state.
ER -