Abstract
We investigate the reduced dynamics of single or two qubits coupled to an interacting quantum spin bath modeled by a XXZ spin chain. By using the method of time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (t-DMRG), we evaluate nonperturbatively the induced decoherence and entanglement. We find that the behavior of both decoherence and entanglement strongly depend on the phase of the underlying spin bath. We show that spin baths can induce entanglement for an initially disentangled pair of qubits. We observe that entanglement sudden death only occurs in paramagnetic phase and discuss the effect of the coupling range.