We report on the dissipative dynamics of an entangled, bipartite interacting system. We show how to induce and control the so-called early-stage disentanglement (and “delayed” entanglement generation) dynamics by means of a driving laser field. We demonstrate that some of the features currently associated with pure non-Markovian effects in such entanglement behavior can actually take place in Markovian environments if background-noise quantum electrodynamics fluctuations are considered. We illustrate this for the case of a dimer interacting molecular system for which emission rates, interaction strength, and radiative corrections have been previously measured. We also show that even in the absence of collective decay mechanisms and qubit-qubit interactions, the entanglement still exhibits collapse-revival behavior. Our results indicate that zero-point energy fluctuations should be taken into account when formulating precise entanglement dynamics statements.

• Received 29 January 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.82.042102