Robustness of entanglement as a signature of quantum phase transitions

We investigate the critical behavior of pairwise entanglement at quantum phase transitions (QPT) in several exactly solvable spin models with noise in system control parameters. We show that the exact critical behavior will change due to noise. When the noise is not too large, pairwise entanglement is robust as a signature of QPT in some spin models. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.