We investigate the effects of inhomogeneities on spin entanglement in many-electron systems from an ab-initio approach. The key quantity in our approach is the local spin entanglement length, which is derived from the local concurrence of the electro
nic system. Although the concurrence for an interacting systems is a highly nonlocal functional of the density, it does have a simple, albeit approximate expression in terms of Kohn-Sham orbitals. We show that the electron localization function -- well known in quantum chemistry as a descriptor of atomic shells and molecular bonds -- can be reinterpreted in terms of the ratio of the local entanglement length of the inhomogeneous system to the entanglement length of a homogenous system at the same density. We find that the spin entanglement is remarkably enhanced in atomic shells and molecular bonds.
We theoretically investigate the efficiency of an entanglement swapping procedure based on the use of quantum dots as sources of entangled photon pairs. The four-photon interference that affects such efficiency is potentially limited by the fine-stru
cture splitting and by the time correlation between cascaded photons, which provide which-path information. The effect of spectral inhomogeneity is also considered, and a possible quantum eraser experiment is discussed for the case of identical dots.
Entanglement between individual spins can be detected by using thermodynamics quantities as entanglement witnesses. This applies to collective spins also, provided that their internal degrees of freedom are frozen, as in the limit of weakly-coupled n
anomagnets. Here, we extend such approach to the detection of entanglement between subsystems of a spin cluster, beyond such weak-coupling limit. The resulting inequalities are violated in spin clusters with different geometries, thus allowing the detection of zero- and finite-temperature entanglement. Under relevant and experimentally verifiable conditions, all the required expectation values can be traced back to correlation functions of individual spins, that are now made selectively available by four-dimensional inelastic neutron scattering.
We introduce a scheme to perform quantum-information processing that is based on a hybrid spin-photon qubit encoding. The proposed qubits consist of spin-ensembles coherently coupled to microwave photons in coplanar waveguide resonators. The quantum
gates are performed solely by shifting the resonance frequencies of the resonators on a ns timescale. An additional cavity containing a Cooper-pair box is exploited as an auxiliary degree of freedom to implement two-qubit gates. The generality of the scheme allows its potential implementation with a wide class of spin systems.
Antiferromagnetic spin rings represent prototypical realizations of highly correlated, low-dimensional systems. Here we theoretically show how the introduction of magnetic defects by controlled chemical substitutions results in a strong spatial modul
ation of spin-pair entanglement within each ring. Entanglement between local degrees of freedom (individual spins) and collective ones (total ring spins) are shown to coexist in exchange-coupled ring dimers, as can be deduced from general symmetry arguments. We verify the persistence of these features at finite temperatures, and discuss them in terms of experimentally accessible observables.
We derive energy minima for biseparable states in three- and four-spin systems, with Heisenberg Hamiltonian and s <= 5/2. These provide lower bounds for tripartite and quadripartite entanglement in chains and rings with larger spin number N. We demon
strate that the ground state of an $N$-spin Heisenberg chain is $N$-partite entangled, and compute the energy gap with respect to biseparable states for N <= 8.
Quantum simulators are controllable systems that can be used to simulate other quantum systems. Here we focus on the dynamics of a chain of molecular qubits with interposed antiferromagnetic dimers. We theoretically show that its dynamics can be cont
rolled by means of uniform magnetic pulses and used to mimic the evolution of other quantum systems, including fermionic ones. We propose two proof-of-principle experiments, based on the simulation of the Ising model in transverse field and of the quantum tunneling of the magnetization in a spin-1 system.
