Harvesting correlations from vacuum quantum fields in the presence of a reflecting boundary

Abstract

We explore correlations harvesting by two static detectors locally interacting with vacuum massless scalar fields in the presence of an infinite perfectly reflecting boundary. We study the phenomena of mutual information harvesting and entanglement harvesting for two detector-boundary alignments, i.e., parallel-to-boundary and vertical-to-boundary alignments. Our results show that the presence of the boundary generally inhibits mutual information harvesting relative to that in flat spacetime without any boundaries. In contrast, the boundary may play a doubled-edged role in entanglement harvesting, i.e., inhibiting entanglement harvesting in the near zone of the boundary while assisting it in the far zone of the boundary. Moreover, there exists an optimal detector energy gap difference between two nonidentical detectors that makes such detectors advantageous in correlations harvesting as long as the interdetector separation is large enough. The value of the optimal detector energy gap difference depends on both the interdetector separation and the detector-to-boundary distance. A comparison of the correlations harvesting in two different alignments shows that although correlations harvesting share qualitatively the same properties, they also display quantitative differences in that the detectors in vertical-to-boundary alignment always harvest comparatively more mutual information than the parallel-to-boundary ones, while they harvest comparatively more entanglement only near the boundary.

33 pages, 14 figures, to appear in JHEP

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• Can the latent signatures of quantum superposition be detected through correlation harvesting?
• Can boundary configuration be tuned to optimize directional quantum steering harvesting?
• Atom-field dynamics in curved spacetime
• Does relativistic motion really freeze initially maximal entanglement?
• Bosonic and fermionic mutual information of N-partite systems in dilaton black hole background
• Non-monotonic evolution of multipartite entanglement under the Unruh effect
• Mutual information harvesting for circularly accelerated detectors