Electron-mediated entanglement in semiconductor phonon systems

Phonons in condensed matter systems are usually treated as a decohering thermal bath. We study the entanglement between the phononic modes which is created by the interaction with a fermionic system (electrons) whose degrees of freedom are traced out as a thermal bath. The resulting picture thus reverses the usual scheme and aims at highlighting the possibility of exploiting bosonic degrees of freedom in condensed matter systems for new quantum computing protocols. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.