arXiv2025
The fact that in the course of an open evolution there is, in a vast majority of cases, the creation of system-environment entanglement out of the initial coherence, has been known for many years. However, how much entanglement can be created under general assumptions has not been analyzed yet. In this work, we investigate system-environment entanglement generation under a broad and important class of interactions known as pure dephasing interactions and for arbitrary initial conditions. Our main results are the following bounds on the relative entropy of entanglement $E_r(σ_{SE})$ after evolution: $ C_r(ρ_S) - H(\mathcal{I}|\mathcal{M}) \leq E_r(σ_{SE}) \leq C_r(ρ_S) - C_r(σ_S) + H(\mathcal{I})$, connecting it on one side to the initial relative entropy of coherence, $C_r(ρ_S)$, and information extractable from the environment, $H(\mathcal{I}|\mathcal{M})$, and on the other side to the decoherence strength, $ C_r(ρ_S) - C_r(σ_S)$, making quantitatively precise the statement that larger entanglement leads to more decoherence. As an illustration, we apply our results to the spin-boson model, where a qubit interacts with a bosonic bath, showing time evolution of the entanglement and the Markovian/non-Markovian crossover. Our results help better understand and quantify the complicated correlations, produced during an open evolution, which will hopefully lead to better and new decoherence mitigation techniques.