A thermal field, which frequently appears in problems of decoherence, provides us with minimal information about the field. We study the interaction of the thermal field and a quantum system composed of two qubits and find that such a chaotic field with minimal information can nevertheless entangle qubits that are prepared initially in a separable state. This simple model of a quantum register interacting with a noisy environment allows us to understand how memory of the environment affects the state of a quantum register.

An entangled two-mode coherent state is studied within the framework of 2×2-dimensional Hilbert space. An entanglement concentration scheme based on joint Bell-state measurements is worked out. When the entangled coherent state is embedded in vacuum environment, its entanglement is degraded but not totally lost. It is found that the larger the initial coherent amplitude, the faster entanglement decreases. We investigate a scheme to teleport a coherent superposition state while considering a mixed quantum channel. We find that the decohered entangled coherent state may be useless for quantum teleportation as it gives the optimal fidelity of teleportation less than the classical limit 2/3.

Transfer of entanglement and information is studied for quantum teleportation of an unknown entangled state through noisy quantum channels. We find that the quantum entanglement of the unknown state can be lost during the teleportation even when the channel is quantum correlated. We introduce a fundamental parameter of correlation information which dissipates linearly during the teleportation through the noisy channel. Analyzing the transfer of correlation information, we show that the purity of the initial state is important in determining the entanglement of the replica state.

Partial teleportation of entanglement is to teleport one particle of an entangled pair through a quantum channel. This is conceptually equivalent to quantum swapping. We consider the partial teleportation of entanglement in the noisy environment, employing the Werner-state representation of the noisy channel for the simplicity of calculation. To have the insight of the many-body teleportation, we introduce the measure of correlation information and study the transfer of the correlation information and entanglement. We find that the fidelity becomes smaller as the initial state is entangled more for a given entanglement of the quantum channel. The entangled channel transfers at least some of the entanglement to the final state.

A scheme for entanglement teleportation is proposed to incorporate multipartite entanglement of four qubits as a quantum channel. Based on the invariance of entanglement teleportation under an arbitrary two-qubit unitary transformation, we derive relations for the separabilities of joint measurements at a sending station and of unitary operations at a receiving station. From the relations of the separabilities it is found that an inseparable quantum channel always leads to total teleportation of entanglement with an inseparable joint measurement and/or a nonlocal unitary operation.