Acceleration-assisted entanglement harvesting and rangefinding

TL;DR

This paper investigates how relativistic acceleration affects entanglement harvesting from quantum fields, revealing enhancements with anti-parallel acceleration and methods for distance measurement based on entanglement properties.

Contribution

It introduces new insights into acceleration-assisted entanglement harvesting and proposes three methods for rangefinding using entanglement characteristics.

Findings

Enhanced entanglement harvesting with anti-parallel acceleration

Entanglement degradation for parallel acceleration similar to de Sitter space

Nonlocal storage of distance information in the joint detector state

Abstract

We study entanglement harvested from a quantum field through local interaction with Unruh-DeWitt detectors undergoing linear acceleration. The interactions allow entanglement to be swapped locally from the field to the detectors. We find an enhancement in the entanglement harvesting by two detectors with anti-parallel acceleration over those with inertial motion. This enhancement is characterized by the presence of entanglement between two detectors that would otherwise maintain a separable state in the absence of relativistic motion (with the same distance of closest approach in both cases). We also find that entanglement harvesting is degraded for two detectors undergoing parallel acceleration in the same way as for two static, comoving detectors in a de Sitter universe. This degradation is known to be different from that of two inertial detectors in a thermal bath. We comment on the physical origin of the harvested entanglement and present three methods for determining distance between two detectors using properties of the harvested entanglement. Information about the separation is stored nonlocally in the joint state of the accelerated detectors after the interaction; a single detector alone contains none. We also find an example of entanglement sudden death exhibited in parameter space.