Decoherence and Loss of Entanglement in Acoustic Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper investigates decoherence and entanglement loss in acoustic black holes, focusing on ion trap models, calculating decoherence times, and proposing parameter adjustments to preserve quantum correlations.

Contribution

It provides a general formalism for decoherence analysis in acoustic black holes and offers specific parameter recommendations to maintain entanglement during measurements.

Findings

Decoherence time computed for proposed experimental parameters.

Quantum to classical transition occurs during measurement.

Entanglement persists for short times and low temperatures.

Abstract

We studied the process of decoherence in acoustic black holes. We focused on the ion trap model proposed by Horstmann et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 250403 (2010)) but the formalism is general to any experimental implementation. For that particular setup, we computed the decoherence time for the experimental parameters that they proposed. We found that a quantum to classical transition occurs during the measurement and we proposed improved parameters to avoid such a feature. We also studied the entanglement between the Hawking-pair phonons for an acoustic black hole while in contact with a reservoir, through the quantum correlations, showing that they remain strongly correlated for small enough times and temperatures.