Evolution of Entanglement of two qubits interacting through local and collective environment

We analyze the dynamics of entanglement between two qubits which interact through collective and local environments. Our approach is based on a resonance theory which assumes a small interaction between qubits and environments and which gives rigorous perturbation theory results, valid for all times. We obtain expressions for (i) characteristic time-scales for decoherence, relaxation, disentanglement, and for (ii) the evolution of observables, valid uniformly in time t ≥ 0. We introduce a classification of decoherence times based on clustering of the reduced density matrix elements, persisting on all time-scales. We examine characteristic dynamical properties such as creation, death and revival of entanglement. We discuss possible applications of our results for superconducting quantum computation and quantum measurement technologies.