Gravitational waves affect vacuum entanglement

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gravitational waves influence vacuum entanglement between two atoms using an entanglement harvesting protocol, revealing frequency-dependent resonance effects that could aid gravitational wave detection and analysis.

Contribution

It demonstrates that gravitational waves affect the entanglement harvested by atoms, showing resonance effects tied to the wave's frequency, which is a novel insight into gravitational wave interactions with quantum fields.

Findings

Transition probability remains unaffected by gravitational waves.

Entanglement harvesting depends on gravitational wave frequency.

Resonance effects occur when detector energy gaps match gravitational wave frequency.

Abstract

The entanglement harvesting protocol is an operational way to probe vacuum entanglement. This protocol relies on two atoms, modelled by Unruh-DeWitt detectors, that are initially unentangled. These atoms then interact locally with the field and become entangled. If the atoms remain spacelike separated, any entanglement between them is a result of entanglement that is `harvested' from the field. Thus, quantifying this entanglement serves as a proxy for how entangled the field is across the regions in which the atoms interacted. Using this protocol, it is demonstrated that while the transition probability of an individual inertial atom is unaffected by the presence of a gravitational wave, the entanglement harvested by two atoms depends sensitively on the frequency of the gravitational wave, exhibiting novel resonance effects when the energy gap of the detectors is tuned to the frequency of the gravitational wave. This suggests that the entanglement signature left by a gravitational wave may be useful in characterizing its properties, and potentially useful in exploring the gravitational-wave memory effect and gravitational-wave induced decoherence.