Decoherence of a Measure of Entanglement

We demonstrate by an explicit model calculation that the decay of entanglement of two two-state systems (two qubits) is governed by the product of the factors that measure the degree of decoherence of each of the qubits, subject to independent sources of quantum noise. This demonstrates an important physical property that separated open quantum systems can evolve quantum mechanically on time scales larger than the times for which they remain entangled.