Abstract

We study the evolution of the entanglement of noninteracting qubits coupled to reservoirs under monitoring of the reservoirs by means of continuous measurements. We calculate the average of the concurrence of the qubits wave function over all quantum trajectories. For two qubits coupled to independent baths subjected to local measurements, this average decays exponentially with a rate depending on the measurement scheme only. This contrasts with the known disappearance of entanglement after a finite time for the density matrix in the absence of measurements. For two qubits coupled to a common bath, the mean concurrence can vanish at discrete times. Our analysis applies to arbitrary quantum jump or quantum state diffusion dynamics in the Markov limit. We discuss the best measurement schemes to protect entanglement in specific examples.