We study entanglement dynamics between four qubits interacting through two isolated Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonians, via an entanglement measure based on the wedge product. We compare the results with similar results obtained using bipartite concurrence resulting in what is referred to as “entanglement sudden death.” We find a natural entanglement invariant under evolution, demonstrating that entanglement spreads out over all of the system’s degrees of freedom that become entangled through the interaction. We also provide an analysis of why certain initial states lose all their entanglement in a finite time, although their excitation and coherence vanish only asymptotically with time.

• Received 26 June 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.76.042313