Entanglement in Massive Coupled Oscillators

TL;DR

This paper explores entanglement in massive coupled oscillators, specifically diatomic molecules, presenting methods to quantify entanglement and revealing conditions for high entanglement that can be explained classically.

Contribution

It introduces two methods for calculating interatomic entanglement in massive oscillators, applicable to Gaussian and non-Gaussian states, with analysis of various molecular configurations.

Findings

High entanglement occurs when trap and molecular frequencies differ greatly and atomic masses are equal.

Interatomic entanglement can be large even when atomic position and momentum correlations are classically explainable.

The developed techniques are applicable to any massive particles with quadratic Hamiltonians.

Abstract

This article investigates entanglement of the motional states of massive coupled oscillators. The specific realization of an idealized diatomic molecule in one-dimension is considered, but the techniques developed apply to any massive particles with two degrees of freedom and a quadratic Hamiltonian. We present two methods, one analytic and one approximate, to calculate the interatomic entanglement for Gaussian and non-Gaussian pure states as measured by the purity of the reduced density matrix. The cases of free and trapped molecules and hetero- and homonuclear molecules are treated. In general, when the trap frequency and the molecular frequency are very different, and when the atomic masses are equal, the atoms are highly-entangled for molecular coherent states and number states. Surprisingly, while the interatomic entanglement can be quite large even for molecular coherent states, the covariance of atomic position and momentum observables can be entirely explained by a classical model with appropriately chosen statistical uncertainty.