Entanglement evolution in multipartite cavity-reservoir systems under local unitary operations

Abstract: We analyze the entanglement evolution of two cavity photons being affected by the dissipation of two individual reservoirs. Under an arbitrary local unitary operation on the initial state, it is shown that there is only one parameter which changes the entanglement dynamics. For the bipartite subsystems, we show that the entanglement of the cavity photons is correlated with that of the reservoirs, although the local operation can delay the time at which the photon entanglement disappears and advance the time at which the reservoir entanglement appears. Furthermore, via a new defined four-qubit entanglement measure and two three-qubit entanglement measures, we study the multipartite entanglement evolution in the composite system, which allows us to analyze quantitatively both bipartite and multipartite entanglement within a unified framework. In addition, we also discuss the entanglement evolution with an arbitrary initial state.