Entanglement dynamics for uniformly accelerated two-level atoms coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper studies how entanglement between two uniformly accelerated atoms evolves over time due to electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, revealing effects like degradation, generation, revival, and the influence of polarization.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of entanglement dynamics for accelerated atoms interacting with electromagnetic fields, highlighting polarization effects and differences from scalar-field cases.

Findings

Entanglement dynamics depend on atomic polarization directions.

Acceleration and separation influence entanglement generation and revival.

Accelerated atoms behave like static ones in a thermal bath only at very small accelerations.

Abstract

We investigate the entanglement dynamics of two uniformly accelerated atoms with the same acceleration perpendicular to their separation. The two-atom system is treated as an open system coupled with fluctuating electromagnetic fields in the Minkowski vacuum, and in the Born-Markov approximation the master equation that describes the completely positive time evolution of the two-atom system is derived. In particular, we investigate the phenomena of entanglement degradation, generation, revival and enhancement. As opposed to the scalar-field case, the entanglement dynamics is crucially dependent on the polarization directions of the atoms. For the two-atom system with certain acceleration and separation, the polarization directions of the atoms may determine whether entanglement generation, revival or enhancement happens, while for entanglement degradation, they affect the decay rate of entanglement. A comparison between the entanglement evolution of accelerated atoms and that of static ones immersed in a thermal bath at the Unruh temperature shows that they are the same only when the acceleration is extremely small.