Entanglement and decoherence in near-critical qubit chains

We study the problem of environmentally-induced decoherence in a near-critical one-dimensional system of N>>1 coupled qubits. Using the Jordan-Wigner fermion representation of the qubit operators we identify the decoherence rates relevant for the two-qubit reduced density matrix. We find that a desirable onset of massive shared entanglement in the near-critical regime comes at the expense of decoherence which also tends to increase as the system is tuned towards criticality. Our results reveal rather contradictory general requirements that future designs of a qubit chain-based quantum information processor will need to satisfy. Comment: Latex, 5 pages, no figure