Entanglement harvesting of accelerated detectors versus static ones in a thermal bath

TL;DR

This paper compares entanglement harvesting capabilities of uniformly accelerated detectors and static detectors in a thermal bath, revealing how energy gap size and temperature influence entanglement and highlighting the anti-Unruh effect.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of how acceleration and thermal noise affect entanglement harvesting, introducing the anti-Unruh effect in this context.

Findings

Static detectors in a thermal bath harvest more entanglement at small energy gaps.

Accelerated detectors harvest more entanglement at large energy gaps.

Entanglement harvesting decreases with temperature for static detectors, but not always for accelerated ones.

Abstract

We make a detailed comparison between entanglement harvesting for uniformly accelerated detectors in vacuum and static ones in a thermal bath at the Unruh temperature and find that, for a small energy gap relative to the Heisenberg energy of the detectors, static detectors in the thermal bath can harvest more entanglement and possess a comparatively larger harvesting-achievable range than the uniformly accelerated ones; however, as the energy gap grows sufficiently large, the uniformly accelerated detectors are instead likely to harvest more entanglement and possess a relatively larger harvesting-achievable range than inertial ones in the thermal bath. In comparison with static detectors in vacuum, there exist phenomena of acceleration-assisted entanglement harvesting but never that of thermal-noise-assisted one. A notably interesting feature is that, although both the amount of entanglement harvested and the harvesting-achievable interdetector separation for static detectors in a thermal bath are always a decreasing function of temperature, they are not always so for uniformly accelerated detectors as acceleration (Unruh temperature) varies, suggesting the existence of the anti-Unruh effect in the entanglement harvesting phenomena of the accelerated detectors.