Entanglement in incoherent mixtures of pure states of two qubits is considered via the concurrence measure. A set of pure states is optimal if the concurrence for any mixture of them is the weighted sum of the concurrences of the generating states. When two or three pure real states are mixed it is shown that 28.5% and 5.12% of the cases respectively, are optimal. Conditions that are obeyed by the pure states generating such optimally entangled mixtures are derived. For four or more pure states it is shown that there are no such sets of real states. The implications of these on superposition of two or more dimerized states is discussed. A corollary of these results also show in how many cases rebit concurrence can be the same as that of qubit concurrence.

Quantum Discord (QD) is a measure of the total quantum non-local correlations of a quantum system. The formalism of quantum discord has been applied to various two-qubit mixed states and it has been reported that there is a non-zero quantum discord even when the states are unentangled. To this end, we have calculated the Quantum Discord for higher than two qubit mixed state, that is, the generalized n-qubit Werner state with a bipartite split. We found that the QD saturates to a straight line with unit slope in the thermodynamic limit. Qualitative studies of entanglement between the two subsystems using logarithmic negativity revealed that the entanglement content between them increases nonuniformly with the number of qubits leading to its saturation. We have proved the above claims both analytically and numerically.

The transition from a gapless liquid to a gapped dimerized ground state that occurs in the frustrated antiferromagnetic Majumdar-Ghosh (or J 1 − J 2 Heisenberg) model is revisited from the point of view of entanglement. We study the evolution of entanglement spectra, a "projected subspace" block entropy, and concurrence in the Schmidt vectors through the transition. The standard tool of Schmidt decomposition along with the existence of the unique MG point where the ground states are degenerate and known exactly, suggests the projection into two orthogonal subspaces that is useful even away from this point. Of these, one is a dominant five dimensional subspace containing the complete state at the MG point and the other contributes marginally, albeit with increasing weight as the number of spins is increased. We find that the marginally contributing subspace has a minimum von Neumann entropy in the vicinity of the dimerization transition. Entanglement content between pairs of spins in the Schmidt vectors, studied via concurrence, shows that those belonging to the dominant five dimensional subspace display a clear progress towards dimerization, with the concurrence vanishing on odd/even sublattices, again in the vicinity of the dimerization, and maximizing in the even/odd sublattices at the MG point.In contrast, study of the Schmidt vectors in the marginally contributing subspace, as well as in the projection of the ground state in this space, display pair concurrence which decrease on both the sublattices as the MG point is approached. The robustness of these observations indicate their possible usefulness in the study of models that have similar transitions, and have hitherto been difficult to study using standard entanglement signatures. a

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We study the ground and first excited state of the finite one dimensional Majumdar-Ghosh model with quenched disorder about the avoided crossings. We find a relation between the shift of the first avoided crossing and average value of random numbers. For low disorder regime, the two-qubit, odd and even partition entanglement gets exchanged at avoided crossings for low spin, and former two for any value of spin. This effect has a deep relation with the dimerization nature of these states. We develop an expression sans entanglement measures to detect and study these crossings.