The Unruh effect and entanglement generation for accelerated atoms near a reflecting boundary

TL;DR

This paper investigates how two uniformly accelerated atoms near a reflecting boundary can generate entanglement through vacuum fluctuations, revealing differences from static atoms in a thermal bath at the Unruh temperature.

Contribution

It demonstrates that boundary conditions alter entanglement dynamics of accelerated atoms, challenging the assumption that acceleration equates to thermal behavior.

Findings

Accelerated atoms near a boundary show unique entanglement features.

Boundary effects cause deviations from thermal bath behavior.

Entanglement generation differs from static atoms in a thermal environment.

Abstract

We study, in the framework of open systems, the entanglement generation of two independent uniformly accelerated atoms in interaction with the vacuum fluctuations of massless scalar fields subjected to a reflecting plane boundary. We demonstrate that, with the presence of the boundary, the accelerated atoms exhibit distinct features from static ones in a thermal bath at the corresponding Unruh temperature in terms of the entanglement creation at the neighborhood of the initial time. In this sense, accelerated atoms in vacuum do not necessarily have to behave as if they were static in a thermal bath at the Unruh temperature.