Creating, distributing and freezing entanglement with spin chains

We show how branching spin chains can be used to both generate and distribute entanglement from their natural dynamics. Such entanglement provides a useful resource, for example for teleportation or distributed quantum processing. Once distributed, this resource can be isolated through mapping or swapping the entanglement into specific qubits at the ends of branches. Alternatively, as we demonstrate for distributed bipartite entanglement, applying simple single-qubit operations to the end spin of one or more branches can dynamically freeze the entanglement at the branch ends.