Can entanglement be extracted from many body systems?

Some thermodynamical properties of solids, such as heat capacity and magnetic susceptibility, have recently been shown to be linked to the amount of entanglement in a solid. Until now, however, it was not clear whether this entanglement can be used as a resource in quantum information theory. Here we show that this entanglement is physical, demonstrating the principles of its extraction from a typical spin chain by scattering two particles off the system. Moreover, we show how to simulate this process using present-day optical lattice technology. © 2007 World Scientific Publishing Company.