Losing energy usually kills quantum states, but it can actually be the thing that forces particles to get perfectly in sync.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Non-Hermiticity induced thermal entanglement phase transition
arXiv · 2603.21968
The Takeaway
Quantum entanglement is famously fragile and easily ruined by heat or noise. This paper demonstrates a strange paradox: by carefully controlling how a system leaks energy, you can trigger a phase transition that creates 'maximal entanglement' where it would otherwise be impossible.
From the abstract
Theoretical analysis of a prototypical two-qubit effective non-Hermitian system characterized by asymmetric Heisenberg $XY$ interactions in the absence of external magnetic fields demonstrates that maximal bipartite entanglement and quantum phase transitions can be induced exclusively through non-Hermiticity. At thermal equilibrium as $T\rightarrow 0$, the system attains maximal entanglement ${C}=1$ for values of the non-Hermiticity parameter greater than a critical value $\gamma>\gamma_c=J\sqrt