Lensing of Vacuum Entanglement near Schwarzschild Black Holes

Abstract

An important feature of Schwarzschild spacetime is the presence of orbiting null geodesics and caustics. Their presence implies strong gravitational lensing effects for matter and radiation, i.e., for excitations of quantum fields. Here, we raise the question whether the lensing manifests itself also in the vacuum of quantum fields, namely by lensing the distribution of vacuum entanglement. To explore this possibility, we use the method of entanglement harvesting, where initially unentangled localized quantum systems are temporarily coupled to the field at different locations. We find that for the Boulware, Hartle-Hawking and Unruh vacua in 3+1 dimensional Schwarzschild spacetime, the harvesting of vacuum entanglement is indeed greatly amplified near caustics. In particular, we establish that pre-existing vacuum entanglement can be harvested also for lightlike separations.

22 pages (incl. 9 pages appendix), 10 figures (3 animated figures in ancillary files), RevTeX 4.1. v3: minor typos, update to published version

References in corpus (12)

• Entangling Power of an Expanding Universe
• Quantum delocalization, gauge and quantum optics: The light-matter interaction in relativistic quantum information
• General Relativistic Quantum Optics: Finite-size particle detector models in curved spacetimes
• Harvesting Entanglement with Detectors Freely Falling into a Black Hole
• Broken covariance of particle detector models in relativistic quantum information
• Mode-sum regularization of $⟨{\varphi }^2⟩$ in the angular-splitting method
• Relativistic causality in particle detector models: Faster-than-light signalling and "Impossible measurements"
• Vacuum entanglement enhancement by a weak gravitational field
• Communication through quantum fields near a black hole
• Replacing the Notion of Spacetime Distance by the Notion of Correlation
• The geometry of spacetime from quantum measurements
• Quantum correlator outside a Schwarzschild black hole

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Fully Relativistic Entanglement Harvesting
• Particle Detectors from Localized Quantum Field Theories
• Closed-form expressions for smeared bi-distributions of a massless scalar field: non-perturbative and asymptotic results in relativistic quantum information
• Gravitational entanglement witness through Einstein ring image
• Interference of communication and field correlations in entanglement harvesting
• Can boundary configuration be tuned to optimize directional quantum steering harvesting?
• The Unruh-DeWitt model and its joint interacting Hilbert space
• Harvesting Fermionic Field Entanglement in Schwarzschild Spacetime
• Quenched entanglement harvesting
• Atom-field dynamics in curved spacetime
• Derivative coupling enables genuine entanglement harvesting in causal communication
• Entanglement and correlations between local observables in de Sitter spacetime
• A dynamic theory of entanglement for uniformly accelerated atoms
• Cosmological Expansion Induces Interference Between Communication and Entanglement Harvesting
• Bipartite and tripartite entanglement in pure dephasing relativistic spin-boson model