We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state ρ shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this “work deficit” and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. In particuar, for pure states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of...

A model of discrete dynamics of entanglement of a bipartite quantum state is considered. It involves a global unitary dynamics of the system and periodic actions of local bistochastic or decaying channel. For initially pure states the decay of entanglement is accompanied by an increase of von Neumann entropy of the system. We observe and discuss revivals of entanglement due to unitary interaction of subsystems. For some mixed states...

We analyse stability of the four-dimensional Kitaev model-a candidate for scalable quantum memory - in finite temperature within the weak coupling Markovian limit. It is shown that, below a critical temperature, certain topological qubit observables X and Z possess relaxation times exponentially long in the size of the system. Their construction involves polynomial in system size algorithm which uses as an input the results of...