Initial-state randomness as a universal source of decoherence

Marko Znidaric

Published 2008-05-05, updated 2008-08-15Version 2

We study time evolution of entanglement between two qubits, which are part of a larger system, after starting from a random initial product state. We show that, due to randomness in the initial product state, entanglement is present only between directly coupled qubits and only for short times. Time dependence of the entanglement appears essentially independent of the specific hamiltonian used for time evolution and is well reproduced by a parameter-free two-body random matrix model.