Long-range quantum entanglement in noisy cluster states

Abstract

We describe a phase transition for long-range entanglement in a three-dimensional cluster state affected by noise. The partially decohered state is modeled by the thermal state of a short-range translation-invariant Hamiltonian. We find that the temperature at which the entanglement length changes from infinite to finite is nonzero. We give an upper and lower bound to this transition temperature.