Nonequilibrium dissipation-driven steady many-body entanglement

International audienceWe study an ensemble of two-level quantum systems (qubits) interacting with a common electromagnetic fieldin the proximity of a dielectric slab whose temperature is held different from that of some far surrounding walls.We show that the dissipative dynamics of the qubits driven by this stationary and out of thermal equilibriumfield allows the production of steady many-body entangled states, different from the case at thermal equilibriumwhere steady states are always nonentangled. By studying up to ten qubits, we point out the role of symmetry inthe entanglement production, which is exalted in the case of permutationally invariant configurations. In the caseof three qubits, we find a strong dependence of tripartite entanglement on the spatial disposition of the qubits,and in the case of six qubits we find several highly entangled bipartitions where entanglement can, remarkably,survive for large qubit-qubit distances up to 100 μm