Observation of the emergence of multipartite entanglement between a bipartite system and its environment

The dynamics of the environment is usually experimentally inaccessible and hence ignored for open systems. Here we overcome this limitation by using an interferometric setup that allows the implementation of several decoherence channels and full access to all environmental degrees of freedom. We show that when a qubit from an entangled pair interacts with the environment, the initial bipartite entanglement gets redistributed into bipartite and genuine multipartite entanglements involving the two qubits and the environment. This is yet another trait of the subtle behavior of entangled open systems.