Entanglement between smeared field operators in the Klein-Gordon vacuum

TL;DR

This paper introduces smeared field operators in quantum field theory to detect vacuum entanglement between regions, revealing that entanglement persists up to a distance comparable to the particle's Compton wavelength.

Contribution

It proposes a practical method using collective observables to witness vacuum entanglement in quantum fields, bridging theoretical concepts with potential experiments.

Findings

Vacuum entanglement can be detected with smeared field operators.

Entanglement persists up to a distance of the order of the Compton wavelength.

Explicit collective observables reveal correlations in the Klein-Gordon vacuum.

Abstract

Quantum field theory is the application of quantum physics to fields. It provides a theoretical framework widely used in particle physics and condensed matter physics. One of the most distinct features of quantum physics with respect to classical physics is entanglement or the existence of strong correlations between subsystems that can even be spacelike separated. In quantum fields, observables restricted to a region of space define a subsystem. While there are proofs on the existence of local observables that would allow a violation of Bell's inequalities in the vacuum states of quantum fields as well as some explicit but technically demanding schemes requiring an extreme fine-tuning of the interaction between the fields and detectors, an experimentally accessible entanglement witness for quantum fields is still missing. Here we introduce smeared field operators which allow reducing the vacuum to a system of two effective bosonic modes. The introduction of such collective observables is motivated by the fact that no physical probe has access to fields in single spatial (mathematical) points but rather smeared over finite volumes. We first give explicit collective observables whose correlations reveal vacuum entanglement in the Klein-Gordon field. We then show that the critical distance between the two regions of space above which two effective bosonic modes become separable is of the order of the Compton wavelength of the particle corresponding to the massive Klein-Gordon field.