Entanglement amplification between superposed detectors in flat and curved spacetimes

TL;DR

This paper shows that superposing the paths of Unruh-deWitt detectors enables entanglement harvesting from quantum fields in regimes where classical trajectories fail, with entanglement increasing with temperature in certain cases.

Contribution

It introduces a novel entanglement harvesting protocol using superposed detector trajectories, revealing effects not possible with classical paths and challenging previous no-go theorems.

Findings

Entanglement can be harvested from superposed trajectories where classical paths fail.

Harvested entanglement increases with temperature in certain delocalized detector configurations.

Mutual information harvesting depends on nonlocal correlations between superposed trajectories.

Abstract

We consider an entanglement harvesting protocol between two Unruh-deWitt detectors in quantum superpositions of static trajectories in the static de Sitter and thermal Minkowski spacetimes. We demonstrate for the first time that the spatial superposition of each detector's path allows entanglement to be harvested from the quantum field in regimes where it would be otherwise impossible for detectors on classical trajectories. Surprisingly, for detectors on sufficiently delocalised trajectories in a thermal bath, the amount of harvested entanglement grows with the temperature of the field, violating a no-go theorem derived by Simidzija et. al. (Phys. Rev. D 98, 085007). We also discover interesting effects for mutual information harvesting, which depends sensitively on the nonlocal correlations between the superposed trajectories between the paths of the respective detectors.