Entanglement generation in atoms immersed in a thermal bath of external quantum scalar fields with a boundary

Abstract

We examine the entanglement creation between two mutually independent two-level atoms immersed in a thermal bath of quantum scalar fields in the presence of a perfectly reflecting plane boundary. With the help of the master equation that describes the evolution in time of the atom subsystem obtained, in the weak-coupling limit, by tracing over environment (scalar fields) degrees of freedom, we find that the presence of the boundary may play a significant role in the entanglement creation in some circumstances and the new parameter, the distance of the atoms from the boundary, besides the bath temperature and the separation between the atoms, gives us more freedom in manipulating entanglement generation. Remarkably, the final remaining entanglement in the equilibrium state is independent of the presence of the boundary.

19 pages, 4 figures, to be published in PRA

References in corpus (2)

• Spontaneous absorption of an accelerated hydrogen atom near a conducting plane in vacuum
• Vacuum fluctuations and Brownian motion of a charged test particle near a reflecting boundary

Cited by in corpus (8)

• The Unruh effect and entanglement generation for accelerated atoms near a reflecting boundary
• Entanglement dynamics for uniformly accelerated two-level atoms coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations
• Effective master equations for two accelerated qubits
• Harvesting correlations from vacuum quantum fields in the presence of a reflecting boundary
• Thermal effect in a causal diamond: open quantum systems approach
• Entanglement dynamics for circularly accelerated two-level atoms coupled with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations
• Effects of decoherence on the radiative and squeezing properties in a coherently driven trapped two-level atom
• Entanglement dynamics for atoms near a reflecting boundary: Enhancement and suppression by environment-induced interactions