Thermal robustness of multipartite entanglement of the 1-D spin 1/2 XY model

Yoshifumi Nakata, Damian Markham, Mio Murao

Published 2008-06-23, updated 2009-03-12Version 2

We study the robustness of multipartite entanglement of the ground state of the one-dimensional spin 1/2 XY model with a transverse magnetic field in the presence of thermal excitations, by investigating a threshold temperature, below which the thermal state is guaranteed to be entangled. We obtain the threshold temperature based on the geometric measure of entanglement of the ground state. The threshold temperature reflects three characteristic lines in the phase diagram of the correlation function. Our approach reveals a region where multipartite entanglement at zero temperature is high but is thermally fragile, and another region where multipartite entanglement at zero temperature is low but is thermally robust.