Spontaneous emission and quantum discord: comparison of Hilbert-Schmidt and trace distance discord

Hilbert - Schmidt and trace norm geometric quantum discord are compared with regard to their behavior during local time evolution. We consider the system of independent two - level atoms with time evolution given by the dissipative process of spontaneous emission. It is explicitly shown that the Hilbert - Schmidt norm discord has nonphysical properties with respect to such local evolution and cannot serve as a reasonable measure of quantum correlations and the better choice is to use trace norm discord as such a measure

Asymptotic Entanglement and Lindblad Dynamics: a Perturbative Approach

We consider an open bipartite quantum system with dissipative Lindblad type dynamics. In order to study the entanglement of the stationary states, we develop a perturbative approach and apply it to the physically significant case when a purely dissipative perturbation is added to the unperturbed generator which by itself would produce reversible unitary dynamics.Comment: 15 page

Controlling Entanglement Generation in External Quantum Fields

Two, non-interacting two-level atoms immersed in a common bath can become mutually entangled when evolving with a Markovian, completely positive dynamics. For an environment made of external quantum fields, this phenomenon can be studied in detail: one finds that entanglement production can be controlled by varying the bath temperature and the distance between the atoms. Remarkably, in certain circumstances, the quantum correlations can persist in the asymptotic long-time regime.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in J. Opt. B: Quantum Semiclass. Op

Unital quantum operators on the Bloch ball and Bloch region

For one qubit systems, we present a short, elementary argument characterizing unital quantum operators in terms of their action on Bloch vectors. We then show how our approach generalizes to multi-qubit systems, obtaining inequalities that govern when a ``diagonal'' superoperator on the Bloch region is a quantum operator. These inequalities are the n-qubit analogue of the Algoet-Fujiwara conditions. Our work is facilitated by an analysis of operator-sum decompositions in which negative summands are allowed.Comment: Revised and corrected, to appear in Physical Review