Temporal steering of entanglement decay with single-shot control

Abstract

Entanglement in open quantum systems can vanish abruptly through entanglement sudden death (ESD) under dissipative evolution, posing a challenge for quantum technologies. Here, we show that the timing of a single local unitary operation can deterministically steer the trajectory of entanglement decay. This introduces temporal steering of dissipative quantum dynamics as a control resource. We develop a time-dependent open-system framework in which a time-shift operator generates a family of effective conditional maps parametrized by $x \in [0,1]$, connecting independent and correlated amplitude damping. Within this framework, we derive analytic conditions for ESD and show that a single intermediate local $\sigma_x$ operation can avoid, delay, or hasten ESD by redirecting the dissipative trajectory rather than modifying the environment. We further prove that this single-shot protocol is optimal within a broad class of local control strategies. Experimentally, a displaced-Sagnac interferometer realizes the correlated-damping-like regime and, for the first time in one photonic platform, demonstrates avoidance, delay, and hastening of the separability transition. Our results establish temporal steering of open-system dynamics as a practical paradigm for decoherence control, and demonstrate operational advantages in use cases such as teleportation, illustrating that in dissipative quantum systems knowing \textit{when} to act can be as important as knowing \textit{what} operation to perform.