Steady-State Entanglement Generation via Casimir-Polder Interactions

TL;DR

This paper explores how Casimir-Polder interactions near surfaces can be harnessed to generate and sustain steady-state entanglement between two atoms, revealing optimal conditions and the influence of medium properties.

Contribution

It demonstrates that fluctuation-mediated Casimir-Polder interactions can be used to produce steady-state entanglement, with optimal conditions identified for different surface materials.

Findings

Perfectly conducting and superconducting surfaces achieve about 0.5 concurrence.

Entanglement decreases with metal surface losses but can be optimized at certain distances.

Surface-mediated interactions can be exploited for entanglement despite their usual decoherence effects.

Abstract

We investigate the generation of steady-state entanglement between two atoms resulting from the fluctuation-mediated Casimir-Polder (CP) interactions near a surface. Starting with an initially separable state of the atoms, we analyze the atom-atom entanglement dynamics for atoms placed at distances in the range of $\sim25$ nm away from a planar medium, examining the effect of medium properties and geometrical configuration of the atomic dipoles. We show that perfectly conducting and superconducting surfaces yield an optimal steady-state concurrence value of approximately 0.5. Furthermore, although the generated entanglement decreases with medium losses for a metal surface, we identify an optimal distance from the metal surface that assists in entanglement generation by the surface. While fluctuation-mediated interactions are typically considered detrimental to the coherence of quantum systems at nanoscales, our results demonstrate a mechanism for leveraging such interactions for entanglement generation.