Entanglement Dynamics between Inertial and Non-uniformly Accelerated Detectors

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quantum entanglement evolves between two detectors, one inertial and one non-uniformly accelerated, revealing that acceleration influences the rate of entanglement decay through time dilation effects.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical approach to analyze entanglement dynamics involving non-uniform acceleration without an event horizon or well-defined Unruh temperature.

Findings

Accelerated detector behaves like an oscillator in a time-varying temperature bath.

Acceleration slows down the entanglement disentanglement process.

Non-adiabatic effects cause oscillatory modifications in correlators.

Abstract

We study the time-dependence of quantum entanglement between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors, one at rest in a Minkowski frame, the other non-uniformly accelerated in some specified way. The two detectors each couple to a scalar quantum field but do not interact directly. The primary challenge in problems involving non-uniformly accelerated detectors arises from the fact that an event horizon is absent and the Unruh temperature is ill-defined. By numerical calculation we demonstrate that the correlators of the accelerated detector in the weak coupling limit behaves like those of an oscillator in a bath of time-varying "temperature" proportional to the instantaneous proper acceleration of the detector, with oscillatory modifications due to non-adiabatic effects. We find that in this setup the acceleration of the detector in effect slows down the disentanglement process in Minkowski time due to the time dilation in that moving detector