Frozen multipartite entanglement in photonic crystals

We investigate the multipartite entanglement dynamics of a many-body system consisting of N identical two-level atoms locally embedded in their own band-gap photonic crystals. It is shown that the tripartite entanglement of this photonic-crystal system can be frozen in a stationary state. We also find that a double-sudden-change phenomenon of four-partite entanglement occurs in this photonic-crystal system during the decoherence process under certain suitable conditions. (paper)