Copyright © 2010 Abolfazl Bayat and Sougato Bose. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We study the possibility of using an uniformly coupled finite antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain as a channel for transmitting entanglement. One member of a pair of maximally entangled spins is initially appended to one end of a chain in its ground state and the dynamical propagation of this entanglement to the other end is calculated. We show that, compared to the analogous scheme with a ferromagnetic chain in its ground state, here the entanglement is transmitted faster, with less decay, with a much higher purity and as a narrow pulse form rising nonanalytically from zero. Here nonzero temperatures and depolarizing environments are both found to be less destructive in comparison to the ferromagnetic case. The entanglement is found to propagate through the chain in a peculiar fashion whereby it hops to skip alternate sites.