  We relate disentanglement and decoherence rates in a pair of three-level
atoms subjected to multi-local and collective pure dephasing noise acting in a
preferred basis. The bipartite entanglement decay rate, as bounded from above
by the negativity, is found to be greater than or equal to the
dephasing-decoherence rates characterized by the decay of off-diagonal elements
in the corresponding full density matrix describing the system or the reduced
density matrix describing either qutrit, extending previous results for qubit
pairs subject to such noise.
