Non-Hermiticity induced thermal entanglement phase transition

Abstract

Theoretical analysis of a prototypical two-qubit effective non-Hermitian system characterized by asymmetric Heisenberg XY interactions in the absence of external magnetic fields demonstrates that maximal bipartite entanglement and quantum phase transitions can be induced exclusively through non-Hermiticity. At thermal equilibrium as T→0, the system attains maximal entanglement C=1 for values of the non-Hermiticity parameter greater than a critical value γ>γc=J1−δ2, where J denotes the exchange interaction and δ represents the anisotropy of the system; conversely, for γ<γc, entanglement is nonmaximal and given by C=1−(γ/J)2. The entanglement undergoes a discontinuous transition to zero precisely at γ=γc. This phase transition originates from the closing of the energy gap at a non-Hermiticity-driven ground state degeneracy, which is fundamentally different from an exceptional point.