Boiling Quantum Vacuum: Thermal Subsystems from Ground-State Entanglement
arXiv:2204.01791 · doi:10.1103/PRXQuantum.3.030335
Abstract
In certain special circumstances, such as in the vicinity of a black hole or in a uniformly accelerating frame, vacuum fluctuations appear to give rise to a finite-temperature environment. This effect, currently without experimental confirmation, can be interpreted as a manifestation of quantum entanglement after tracing out vacuum modes in an unobserved region. In this work, we identify a class of experimentally accessible quantum systems where thermal density matrices emerge from vacuum entanglement. We show that reduced density matrices of lower-dimensional subsystems embedded in -dimensional gapped Dirac fermion vacuum, either on a lattice or continuum, have a thermal form with respect to a lower-dimensional Dirac Hamiltonian. Strikingly, we show that vacuum entanglement can even conspire to make a subsystem of a gapped system at zero temperature appear as a hot gapless system. We propose concrete experiments in cold atom quantum simulators to observe the vacuum entanglement induced thermal states.
arXiv comment13 pages, 6 figures
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