Reversible and irreversible dynamics of a qubit interacting with a small environment

We analyze the dynamics of a system qubit interacting by means of a sequence of pairwise collisions with an environment consisting of just two qubits. We show that the density operator of the qubits approaches a common time-averaged equilibrium state, characterized by large fluctuations, only for a random sequence of collisions. For a regular sequence of collisions the qubit states of the system and of the reservoir undergo instantaneous periodic oscillations and do not relax to a common state. Furthermore we show that pure bipartite entanglement is developed only when at least two qubits are initially in the same pure state while otherwise also genuine multipartite entanglement builds up.