Dynamics of spatially indistinguishable particles and quantum entanglement protection

A complete treatment of open quantum systems made of identical particles has remained elusive due to the intrinsic problem of these particles being individually unaddressable. Filling this gap is essential for the full characterization of quantum networks which are typically built by identical subsystems. We provide a general framework which allows one to obtain the dynamics of N noninteracting spatially indistinguishable particles locally coupled to separated environments. This framework is universal, being valid for both bosons and fermions and for any type of system-environment interaction. It is applied to study the dynamics of two identical qubits under paradigmatic Markovian noises, such as phase damping, depolarization, and amplitude damping. We find that spatial indistinguishability of identical qubits is a controllable inherent property of the system which protects exploitable quantum entanglement against detrimental noise.