Entanglement from dissipative dynamics into overlapping environments

We consider two ensembles of qubits dissipating into two overlapping environments, that is, with a certain number of qubits in common that dissipate into both environments. We then study the dynamics of bipartite entanglement between the two ensembles by excluding the common qubits. To get analytical solutions for an arbitrary number of qubits we consider initial states with a single excitation and show that the largest amount of entanglement can be created when excitations are initially located among side (noncommon) qubits. Moreover, the stationary entanglement exhibits a monotonic (nonmonotonic) scaling versus the number of common (side) qubits