Population relaxation effects on entanglement dynamics of the two-qubit spin chains

By analytically solving the master equation, we examine entanglement dynamics of the two-qubit spin system coupled via the XY interaction and in the presence of population relaxation. We found that the entanglement dynamical behaviors are very sensitive to different initialized states. Particularly, for initial states ?=(|01〉〈01|+|10〉〈10|)/2 and ?=(|00〉〈00|+|11〉〈11|)/2, a combination of the XY coupling with the population relaxation can even be used to enhance the entanglement. Moreover, we show that among different initially separable states, ?=|01〉〈01| and ?=|10〉〈10| are more robust in generating pairwise entanglement.