We explore how entanglement of a bipartite system evolves when one subsystem undergoes the action of an arbitrary noisy channel. It is found that the dynamics of entanglement of such system is determined by the channel’s action on the maximally entangled state, which includes as a special case the results for two-qubit systems [Konrad et al., Nat. Phys. 4, 99 (2008)]. In particular, for multiqubit or qubit-qudit systems, we get a general factorization law for the evolution equation of entanglement, with one qubit being subject to a noisy channel.

• Received 24 June 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.79.024303