Bipartite entanglement harvesting with multiple detectors

TL;DR

This paper investigates how multiple Unruh-DeWitt detectors can optimally harvest bipartite entanglement from a quantum vacuum, providing analytic insights into detector arrangements and scaling effects.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbative framework for analyzing entanglement harvesting with multiple detectors and derives explicit formulas for various configurations.

Findings

Negativity depends on a submatrix of the reduced density matrix with linear scaling.

Optimal detector arrangements maximize harvested entanglement.

Increasing the number of detectors broadens the parameter range for entanglement extraction.

Abstract

We study bipartite entanglement harvesting from the quantum vacuum of a massless scalar field between two subsystems, each composed of a finite number of Unruh-DeWitt detectors. Using perturbation theory, we show that the leading-order negativity is fully determined by a submatrix of the reduced density matrix, with the submatrix dimension scaling only linearly with the number of detectors. Within this framework, we analyze how the detectors' spatial arrangement influences harvesting. For all three-detector configurations and several symmetric four-detector configurations, we derive analytic expressions for the negativity and identify the configurations that maximize it. For a linear chain, we find that the harvested entanglement scales linearly with the number of detectors. These results clarify how to arrange multiple detectors to optimize harvesting and show that increasing their number broadens the ranges of energy gaps and separations over which entanglement can be extracted from the field.