Eur. Phys. J. D (2013) 67: 53
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2013-30631-7

Regular Article

Quantum correlation dynamics of a three-qubit system coupled to an XY spin chain

¹ College of Physics and Electronic Information Science, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, P.R. China
² State Key Laboratory of Low-dimensional Quantum Physics and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, P.R. China
³ Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, P.R. China

^a e-mail: guojinliang80@163.com

Received: 12 October 2012
Received in final form: 10 December 2012
Published online: 19 March 2013

Abstract

We study the dynamics of multipartite quantum correlations measured by the lower bound of concurrence and quantum discord in a three-qubit system coupled to an XY spin chain. For the initial pure GHZ and W state, we find the lower bound of entanglement is more robust than the quantum discord against the decoherence induced by the spin environment. But for the Werner state, the sudden death of discord is not observed even in the presence of entanglement sudden death. By comparing the evolutions for the GHZ and W states, we show that the W state preserves more quantum correlations than the GHZ state. In addition, we put research emphasis on the relation between the dynamics of multipartite quantum correlations and the quantum phase transition of the spin environment.