Voyage to Alpha Centauri: Entanglement degradation of cavity modes due to motion

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-uniform motion affects entanglement in a relativistic quantum field within a cavity, proposing a space-based experiment to observe entanglement degradation due to acceleration and gravity effects.

Contribution

It introduces a scheme to analyze entanglement degradation caused by motion in a relativistic quantum field and suggests a feasible space experiment to observe this phenomenon.

Findings

Entanglement degrades under acceleration for optical wavelength quanta at Earth gravity.

Degradation occurs at microgravity for kaon mass quanta.

Proposes a space-based experiment to observe relativistic entanglement effects.

Abstract

We propose a scheme to investigate whether non-uniform motion degrades entanglement of a relativistic quantum field that is localised both in space and in time. For a Dirichlet scalar field in a cavity in Minkowski space, in small but freely-adjustable acceleration of finite but arbitrarily long duration, degradation of observable magnitude occurs for massless transverse quanta of optical wavelength at Earth gravity acceleration and for kaon mass quanta already at microgravity acceleration. We outline a space-based experiment for observing the effect and its gravitational counterpart.