Critical heat current for operating an entanglement engine

Autonomous entanglement engines have recently been proposed to generate steady-state bipartite and multipartite entanglement exploiting only incoherent interactions with thermal baths at different temperatures. In this work, we investigate the interplay between heat current and entanglement in a two-qubit entanglement engine, deriving a critical heat current for successful operation of the engine, i.e. a cut-off above which entanglement is present. The heat current can thus be seen as a witness to the presence of entanglement. In the regime of weak-inter-qubit coupling, we also investigate the effect of two experimentally relevant parameters for the qubits, the energy detuning and tunnelling, on the entanglement production. Finally, we show that the regime of strong inter-qubit coupling provides no clear advantage over the weak regime, in the context of out-of-equilibrium entanglement engines.