Nonequilibrium Effects on Quantum Correlations: Discord, Mutual Information and Entanglement of a Two-Fermionic System in Bosonic and Fermionic Environments

Abstract: We study the steady state entanglement and correlations of an open system comprised of two coupled fermions in the equilibrium or nonequilibrium environments and distill the nonequilibrium contribution to the quantum correlations. We show that in the equilibrium condition, the steady-state quantum correlations exhibit non-monotonic behavior, while in the nonequilibrium case, the monotonicity is determined by many parameters. The entanglement vanishes abruptly upon the increase of the temperature (bias) and chemical potential bias, it witnesses a critical chemical potential above which the concurrence always remains positive. In the fermionic reservoirs, quantum correlations reach the maximal values when one chemical potential of the reservoirs matches to the system frequency. We separate the quantum correlation generation due to the averaged effect from the pure nonequilibrium effect. In contrast with the previous results, when the averaged effect is separated out, the nonequilibrium generation of quantum correlation shows a distinctive monotonic behavior. The difference between the large-tunneling regime with decaying correlations and the small-tunneling with increasing correlations is discussed. Near the boundary of the two regimes, the entanglement behavior is a mixture of two extremes, it resurrects with the increase of chemical potential bias after its previous drop to zero.