Effectiveness of depolarizing noise in causing sudden death of entanglement

Continuing on the recent observation that sudden death of entanglement can occur even when a single qubit of a 2-qubit state is exposed to noisy environment (Yashodamma and Sudha in Results Phys 3:41-45, 2013), we examine the local action of a noise on bipartite qubit-qutrit and qutrit-qutrit systems. We show that depolarizing noise causes sudden death of entanglement in both qubit-qutrit and qutrit-qutrit systems even when it acts only on one part of the system. While generalized amplitude damping noise also causes finite-time disentanglement in qubit-qutrit states, the entanglement sudden death occurs much faster due to depolarizing noise. This result strengthens the observation (Yashodamma and Sudha in Results Phys 3:41-45, 2013) that depolarizing noise is more effective than other noise models in causing sudden death of entanglement.