Effect of dissipation and reservoir temperature on squeezing exchange and emergence of entanglement between two coupled bosonic modes

We study the effect of a thermal reservoir on the squeezing transfer and entanglement between two identical harmonic oscillators, caused by a bilinear coupling of the RWA type. We analyze the evolution of the invariant squeezing coefficients of each mode for arbitrary initially factorized mixed states, as well as the separability coefficient based on Simon's criterion for Gaussian states. We show the importance of initial squeezing for the emergence of entanglement and the existence of critical temperatures above which no squeezing transfer or entanglement are possible. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.