Environment induced entanglement in many-body mesoscopic systems

We show that two, non-interacting, infinitely long spin chains can become globally entangled at the mesoscopic level of their fluctuation operators through a purely noisy microscopic mechanism induced by the presence of a common heat bath. By focusing on a suitable class of mesoscopic observables, the behaviour of the dissipatively generated quantum correlations between the two chains is studied as a function of the dissipation strength and bath temperature. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.