Does acceleration assist entanglement harvesting?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how acceleration influences entanglement harvesting between uniformly accelerated detectors, revealing that acceleration can both enhance and inhibit entanglement depending on parameters, with effects varying across acceleration scenarios.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of acceleration effects on entanglement harvesting in three scenarios, challenging previous assumptions about the anti-parallel acceleration advantage.

Findings

Acceleration increases entanglement for large energy gaps and long interaction durations.

Acceleration can inhibit entanglement harvesting for small energy gaps.

Acceleration-assisted enhancement of harvesting range occurs under specific parameter conditions.

Abstract

We explore whether acceleration assists entanglement harvesting for a pair of uniformly accelerated detectors in three different acceleration scenarios, i.e., parallel, anti-parallel and mutually perpendicular acceleration, both in the sense of the entanglement harvested and harvesting-achievable separation between the two detectors. Within the framework of entanglement harvesting protocols and the Unruh-DeWitt model of detectors locally interacting with massless scalar fields via a Gaussian switching function with an interaction duration parameter, we find that, in the sense of the entanglement harvested, acceleration is a mixed blessing insofar as it increases the harvested entanglement for a large detector energy gap relative to the interaction duration parameter, whilst inhibiting the entanglement harvested for a small energy gap. Regarding the harvesting-achievable separation range between the detectors, we further find that for very small acceleration and large energy gap, both relative to the duration parameter, acceleration-assisted enhancement can happen in all three acceleration scenarios. This is in sharp contrast to what was argued previously: that the harvesting-achievable range can be enhanced only for anti-parallel acceleration. However, for a not too small acceleration relative to the duration parameter and an energy gap larger than the acceleration, we find that only detectors in parallel acceleration possess a harvesting-achievable range larger than those at rest.