Degradation of entanglement in Markovian noise

The entanglement survival time is defined as the maximum time a system which is evolving under the action of local Markovian, homogeneous-in-time noise is capable of preserving the entanglement it had at the beginning of the temporal evolution. In this paper we study how this quantity is affected by the interplay between the coherent preserving and dissipative contributions of the corresponding dynamical generator. We report the presence of a counterintuitive, nonmonotonic behavior in such a functional, capable of inducing sudden death of entanglement in models which, in the absence of unitary driving, are capable of sustaining entanglement for arbitrarily long times.