Fig. 3

Exemplary dynamics. a Bipartite entanglement between the cavity modes E_12:34 taking into account up to 4, 5, and 6 cavity modes, showing that higher modes do not contribute to steady-state entanglement. b Entanglement in the partition 12:34 with varying interaction strengths. c Entanglement between the cavity modes and bacteria, showing faster growth and much higher steady-state values than entanglement between the cavity modes. d Evolution of photon number of the cavity modes \(\bar N_1\), \(\bar N_2\), \(\bar N_3\), \(\bar N_4\) and excitation of the bacteria \(\bar N_{\mathrm{I}}\), \(\bar N_{{\mathrm{II}}}\) (solid lines). Dashed lines represent the evolution when the interactions between the bacteria and light are absent (G_mn = 0). \(\tilde G_{{\mathrm{II}}}\) has been fixed to be 6 × 10¹³ Hz for (a) and (d) while \(\tilde G_{\mathrm{I}} = 3.9 \times 10^{13}\,{\mathrm{Hz}}\) for all graphs. We considered four cavity modes in (b)–(d). In all cases above, steady-state entanglement is reached in ~100 fs