Entanglement dynamics for Unruh-DeWitt detectors interacting with massive scalar fields: The Unruh and anti-Unruh effects

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the entanglement dynamics of two accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detectors interacting with massive scalar fields differ from massless cases, revealing effects like delayed entanglement evolution and an anti-Unruh phenomenon.

Contribution

It demonstrates that massive fields slow entanglement evolution, but high acceleration can counteract this delay, and it uncovers an anti-Unruh effect related to entanglement enhancement with acceleration.

Findings

Entanglement evolution is slower with massive fields.

High acceleration can offset the delay caused by mass.

Maximal entanglement increases with acceleration, indicating an anti-Unruh effect.

Abstract

We study, in the framework of open quantum systems, the entanglement dynamics for a quantum system composed of two uniformly accelerated Unruh-Dewitt detectors interacting with a bath of massive scalar fields in the Minkowski vacuum. We find that the entanglement evolution for the quantum system coupled with massive fields is always slower compared with that of the one coupled with massless fields, and this time-delay effect brought by the field being massive can however be counteracted by a large enough acceleration, in contrast to the case of a static quantum system in a thermal bath, where this time delay is not affected by the temperature. Remarkably, the maximal concurrence of the quantum system generated during evolution may increase with acceleration for any inter-detector separation while that for static ones in a thermal bath decreases monotonically with temperature, and this can be considered as an anti-Unruh effect in terms of the entanglement generated.