  We address the problem of entanglement protection against surrounding noise
by a procedure suitably exploiting spatial indistinguishability of identical
subsystems. To this purpose, we take two initially separated and entangled
identical qubits interacting with two independent noisy environments. Three
typical models of environments are considered: amplitude damping channel, phase
damping channel and depolarizing channel. After the interaction, we deform the
wave functions of the two qubits to make them spatially overlap before
performing spatially localized operations and classical communication (sLOCC)
and eventually computing the entanglement of the resulting state. This way, we
show that spatial indistinguishability of identical qubits can be utilized
within the sLOCC operational framework to partially recover the quantum
correlations spoiled by the environment. A general behavior emerges: the higher
the spatial indistinguishability achieved via deformation, the larger the
amount of recovered entanglement.
