Autonomous entanglement engines have recently been proposed to generate steady-state bipartite and multipartite entanglement exploiting only incoherent interactions with thermal baths at different temperatures. In this work, we investigate the interplay between heat current and entanglement in a two-qubit entanglement engine, deriving a critical heat current for successful operation of the engine, i.e. a cut-off above which entanglement is present. The heat current can thus be seen as a witness to the presence of entanglement. In the regime of weak-inter qubit coupling, we also investigate the effect of two experimentally relevant parameters for the qubits, the energy detuning and tunnelling, on the entanglement production. Finally, we show that the regime of strong inter-qubit coupling provides no clear advantage over the weak regime, in the context of out-of-equilibrium entanglement engines.

中文翻译：

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运行纠缠引擎的临界热流

最近有人提出自主纠缠引擎来产生稳态二分和多分纠缠，仅利用与不同温度下的热浴的非相干相互作用。在这项工作中，我们研究了双量子位纠缠引擎中热流和纠缠之间的相互作用，推导出了发动机成功运行的临界热流，即存在纠缠的截止点。因此，热流可以被视为纠缠存在的见证。在弱量子比特间耦合机制中，我们还研究了量子比特的两个实验相关参数，能量失谐和隧道效应对纠缠产生的影响。最后，我们表明强量子比特间耦合机制比弱机制没有明显优势，