The entanglement dynamics of arrays of qubits is analysed in the presence of some general sources of noise and disorder. In particular, we consider linear chains of Josephson qubits in experimentally realistic conditions. Electromagnetic and other (spin or boson) fluctuations due to the background circuitry and surrounding substrate, finite temperature in the external environment, and disorder in the initial preparation and the control parameters are embedded into our model. We show that the amount of disorder that is typically present in current experiments does not affect the entanglement dynamics significantly, while the presence of noise can have a drastic influence on the generation and propagation of entanglement. We examine under which circumstances the system exhibits steady-state entanglement for both short (N < 10) and long (N > 30) chains and show that, remarkably, there are parameter regimes where the steady-state entanglement is strictly non-monotonic as a function of the noise strength. We also present optimized schemes for entanglement verification and quantification based on simple correlation measurements that are experimentally more economic than state tomography.
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