Abstract
We investigate the reduced dynamics of 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), it is shown that when the spin bath is in an ordering state, the reduced dynamics of qubits strongly depends on the range of the spin chain that qubits coupled to. Only for ordering spin baths, both decoherence and entanglement show qualitatively different behaviors when the coupling range changes. In particular, In particular, we find that in the parametic regime where there is no ordering in the bath, the coupling range is irrelevant. On the other hand, for ordering spin baths, when the coupling range increases from local coupling to infinite range coupling, the reduced dynamics of qubits exhibits a transition in which initially entangled states no longer suffers from the entanglement sudden death when the coupling range is large. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.