Entanglement Generation by Time Varying Refractive Index: Analogy with Cosmological Model

TL;DR

This paper explores how changing the refractive index of a medium can generate entanglement between electromagnetic modes, using an analogy with cosmological models to understand the process.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analogy between cosmological pair creation and electromagnetic entanglement generation via refractive index variation.

Findings

Entanglement encodes information about the medium's refractive index.

The analogy links cosmological pair creation to electromagnetic mode entanglement.

Refractive index changes can be used to control photon entanglement.

Abstract

Generation of entanglement between modes of a electromagnetic fields by sudden change of the refractive index of a medium is considered. We use the analogy between the Fock-space formulation of pair creation caused by the contraction and expansion of the universe on one hand and the pair creation in time-dependent electric fields on the other hand. It is shown that entanglement between photons encodes information concerning the underlying refractive index of a medium.