Information transmission without energy exchange

Abstract

We show that it is possible to use a massless field in the vacuum to communicate in such a way that the signal travels arbitrarily slower than the speed of light and such that no energy is transmitted from the sender to the receiver. Instead, the receiver has to supply a signal-dependent amount of work to switch his detector on and off. Because of that, this kind of communication without energy exchange may be called "Quantum Collect Calling". This type of communication is related to Casimir-like interactions and it is made possible by dimension ---and curvature--- dependent subtleties of Huygens' principle.

Accepted in Physical Review Letters. RevTex 4.1, 5 pages, 2 figures. v3. Updated to match published version

References in corpus (5)

• Beyond the Jaynes-Cummings model: circuit QED in the ultrastrong coupling regime
• How often does the Unruh-DeWitt detector click? Regularisation by a spatial profile
• Wavepacket detection with the Unruh-DeWitt model
• Then again, how often does the Unruh-DeWitt detector click if we switch it carefully?
• Vacuum entanglement enhancement by a weak gravitational field

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Violation of the strong Huygen's principle and timelike signals from the early Universe
• On Coherent Delocalization in the Light-Matter Interaction
• Information carrying capacity of a cosmological constant
• Regularized calculation of the retarded Green function in Schwarzschild spacetime
• Transmission of Information in Non-Local Field Theories
• Massive spin zero fields in cosmology and the tail-free property