Entanglement harvesting of accelerated detectors versus static ones in a thermal bath

Abstract

We make a detailed comparison between entanglement harvesting for uniformly accelerated detectors in vacuum and static ones in a thermal bath at the Unruh temperature and find that, for a small energy gap relative to the Heisenberg energy of the detectors, static detectors in the thermal bath can harvest more entanglement and possess a comparatively larger harvesting-achievable range than the uniformly accelerated ones; however, as the energy gap grows sufficiently large, the uniformly accelerated detectors are instead likely to harvest more entanglement and possess a relatively larger harvesting-achievable range than inertial ones in the thermal bath. In comparison with static detectors in vacuum, there exist phenomena of acceleration-assisted entanglement harvesting but never that of thermal-noise-assisted one. A notably interesting feature is that, although both the amount of entanglement harvested and the harvesting-achievable interdetector separation for static detectors in a thermal bath are always a decreasing function of temperature, they are not always so for uniformly accelerated detectors as acceleration (Unruh temperature) varies, suggesting the existence of the anti-Unruh effect in the entanglement harvesting phenomena of the accelerated detectors.