Recovering entanglement by local operations

We investigate the phenomenon of bipartite entanglement revivals under purely local operations in systems subject to local and independent classical noise sources. We explain this apparent paradox in the physical ensemble description of the system state by introducing the concept of hidden entanglement, which indicates the amount of entanglement that cannot be exploited due to the lack of classical information on the system. For this reason this part of entanglement can be recovered without the action of non-local operations or back-transfer process. For two noninteracting qubits under a low-frequency stochastic noise, we show that entanglement can be recovered by local pulses only. We also discuss how hidden entanglement may provide new insights about entanglement revivals in non-Markovian dynamics. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.