Stability Thresholds for Gravitationally Induced Entanglement in Shielded Setups

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how residual interactions and fluctuations in shielded setups can hinder gravitationally induced entanglement experiments, providing thresholds and mitigation strategies to observe genuine signals.

Contribution

It identifies key noise sources in shielded GIE experiments and quantifies the thresholds for positional and orientational fluctuations to maintain entanglement detection.

Findings

Magnetic and Casimir interactions limit GIE tests by imprinting large phases.

Fluctuations convert phases into decoherence, reducing entanglement.

Shield vibrations can generate correlations mimicking gravitational signals.

Abstract

Proposed experiments for gravitationally induced entanglement (GIE) typically suppress direct electromagnetic interactions between two massive particles by inserting a conducting Faraday shield. For superconducting particles, their large diamagnetism requires additional magnetic shielding to screen magnetic dipolar interactions. Here, we analyze the effect of residual particle-shield interactions and show that both Casimir and magnetic-dipole interactions can severely limit GIE tests by imprinting large phases. We quantify how run-to-run positional and orientational fluctuations of the setup elements, including the shield, trapping potentials, and detectors, convert these phases into effective decoherence, strongly reducing the detectable bipartite entanglement. In particular, we show that magnetic interactions between the particles and a superconducting shield constitute a major noise source, especially relevant for levitated superconducting particles. Treating the vibrational modes of the shield quantum mechanically, we further find that thermal vibrations generate persistent particle-shield correlations and can even mediate particle-particle entanglement that can mimic a gravitational signal. Finally, we derive quantitative thresholds on the maximum tolerable positional and orientational fluctuations of the setup elements required to observe entanglement, and propose mitigation strategies including geometry optimization and shield cooling to preserve a genuine GIE signature.