Maximization of thermal entanglement of arbitrarily interacting two qubits

Abstract: We investigate the thermal entanglement of interacting two qubits. We maximize it by tuning a local Hamiltonian under a given interaction Hamiltonian. We prove that the optimizing local Hamiltonian takes a simple form which dose not depend on the temperature and that the corresponding optimized thermal entanglement decays as $1/(T log T)$ at high temperatures. We also find that at low temperatures the thermal entanglement is maximum without any local Hamiltonians and that the second derivative of the maximized thermal entanglement changes discontinuously at the boundary between the high- and low-temperature phases.