Enhancing the detection of natural thermal entanglement with disorder

Abstract

Physical systems have some degree of disorder present in them. We discuss how to treat natural, thermal entanglement in any random macroscopic system from which a thermodynamic witness bounded by a constant can be found. We propose that functional many-body perturbation theory be applied to allow either a quenched or an annealed average over the disorder to be taken. We find, when considering the example of an XX Heisenberg spin chain with a random coupling strength, that the region of natural entanglement detected by both witnesses can be enhanced by the disorder. © 2009 The American Physical Society.