Entangling Power of an Expanding Universe

By Greg Ver Steeg, Nicolas C. Menicucci. 2007

183 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that entanglement can be used to detect spacetime curvature. Quantum fields in the Minkowski vacuum are entangled with respect to local field modes. This entanglement can be swapped to spatially separated quantum systems using standard local couplings. A single, inertial field detector in the exponentially expanding (de Sitter) vacuum responds as if it were bathed in thermal radiation in a Minkowski universe. We show that using two inertial detectors, interactions with the field in the thermal case will entangle certain detector pairs that would not become entangled in the corresponding de Sitter case. The two universes can thus be distinguished by their entangling power.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0bc1bcebc3de46c132646d580d594e3000afaa4

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Fundamental quantum optics experiments conceivable with satellites—reaching relativistic distances and velocities (2012, background): “ction would be not be enough to distinguish an exponentially expanding universe from a thermal source in a at spacetime. On the other hand, using entanglement induced in spacelike separated detectors [120], a way to distinguish the conformal vacuum of a scalar eld in a DeSitter universe from a therm”
The classical-quantum boundary for correlations: Discord and related measures (2011, unknown): “(Steeg and Menicucci, 2009) use vacuum entanglement to study the entanglement of an exponentially-expanding (de Sitter) vacuum.”
Acceleration-assisted entanglement harvesting and rangefinding (2014, methodology): “[14], we know we will not obtain the same result from two inertial detectors with fixed proper distance L in a thermal bath in the detectors’ rest frame.”