Local entanglement generation in the adiabatic regime

We study entanglement generation in a pair of qubits interacting with an initially correlated system. Using time-independent perturbation theory and the adiabatic theorem, we show conditions under which the qubits become entangled as the joint system evolves into the ground state of the interacting theory. We then apply these results to the case of qubits interacting with a scalar quantum field. We study three different variations of this setup; a quantum field subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions, a quantum field interacting with a classical potential, and a quantum field that starts in a thermal state.