Entanglement between two qubits interacting with a slightly detuned thermal field

In this paper, we investigate entanglement between two two-level atoms when they simultaneously interact with a single-mode thermal field in the strong-coupling regime. We show that a slight detuning between the atomic transition frequency and the field frequency might cause high entanglement between the atoms. More interestingly, if we choose the detuning appropriately, both atoms would somehow get entangled even when both atoms are initially in the excited state.