Entanglement, recoherence and information flow in an accelerated detector - quantum field system: Implications for black hole information issue

TL;DR

This paper models an accelerated detector interacting with a quantum field, revealing persistent entanglement and information flow that suggest black hole information may be preserved in the field rather than lost.

Contribution

It provides an exact solution showing the detector never fully recoheres, implying information transfer to the field in black hole analogs under non-Markovian dynamics.

Findings

Information flows from detector to field immediately upon coupling

Detector never fully recovers quantum coherence at late times

Entanglement remains large, indicating information is stored in the field

Abstract

We study an exactly solvable model where an uniformly accelerated detector is linearly coupled to a massless scalar field initially in the Minkowski vacuum. Using the exact correlation functions we show that as soon as the coupling is switched on one can see information flowing from the detector to the field and propagating with the radiation into null infinity. By expressing the reduced density matrix of the detector in terms of the two-point functions, we calculate the purity function in the detector and study the evolution of quantum entanglement between the detector and the field. Only in the ultraweak coupling regime could some degree of recoherence in the detector appear at late times, but never in full restoration. We explicitly show that under the most general conditions the detector never recovers its quantum coherence and the entanglement between the detector and the field remains large at late times. To the extent this model can be used as an analog to the system of a black hole interacting with a quantum field, our result seems to suggest in the prevalent non-Markovian regime, assuming unitarity for the combined system, that black hole information is not lost but transferred to the quantum field degrees of freedom. Our combined system will evolve into a highly entangled state between a remnant of large area (in Bekenstein's black hole atom analog) without any information of its initial state, and the quantum field, now imbued with complex information content not-so-easily retrievable by a local observer.