Freezing distributed entanglement in spin chains

We show how to freeze distributed entanglement that has been created from the natural dynamics of spin chain systems. The technique that we propose simply requires single-qubit operations and isolates the entanglement in specific qubits at the ends of branches. Such frozen entanglement provides a useful resource, for example for teleportation or distributed quantum processing. The scheme can be applied to a wide range of systems---including actual spin systems and alternative qubit embodiments in strings of quantum dots, molecules, or atoms.