Quantum fluctuations of spacetime generate quantum entanglement between gravitationally polarizable subsystems

Abstract

There should be quantum vacuum fluctuations of spacetime itself, if we accept that the basic quantum principles we are already familiar with apply as well to a quantum theory of gravity. In this paper, we study, in linearized quantum gravity, the quantum entanglement generation at the neighborhood of the initial time between two independent gravitationally polarizable two-level subsystems caused by fluctuating quantum vacuum gravitational fields in the framework of open quantum systems. A bath of fluctuating quantum vacuum gravitational fields serves as an environment that provides indirect interactions between the two gravitationally polarizable subsystems, which may lead to entanglement generation. We find that the entanglement generation is crucially dependent on the polarizations, i.e, they cannot get entangled in certain circumstances when the polarizations of the subsystems are different while they always can when the polarizations are the same. We also show that the presence of a boundary may render parallel aligned subsystems entangled which are otherwise unentangled in a free space. However, the presence of the boundary does not help in terms of entanglement generation if the two subsystems are vertically aligned.