Entanglement of mechanical oscillators coupled to a nonequilibrium environment

Recent experiments aim at cooling nanomechanical resonators to the ground state by coupling them to nonequilibrium environments in order to observe quantum effects such as entanglement. This raises the general question of how such environments affect entanglement. Here we show that there is an optimal dissipation strength for which the entanglement between two coupled oscillators is maximized. Our results are established with the help of a general framework of exact quantum Langevin equations valid for arbitrary bath spectra, in and out of equilibrium. We point out why the commonly employed Lindblad approach fails to give even a qualitatively correct picture.