Qudits for witnessing quantum-gravity-induced entanglement of masses under decoherence

Abstract

Recently a theoretical and an experimental protocol known as quantum gravity induced entanglement of masses (QGEM) has been proposed to test the quantum nature of gravity using two mesoscopic masses each placed in a superposition of two locations. If, after eliminating all non-gravitational interactions between them, the particles become entangled, one can conclude that the gravitational potential is induced via a quantum mediator, i.e. a virtual graviton. In this paper, we examine a range of different experimental set-ups, considering different geometries and the number of spatially superposed states taken, in order to determine which would generate entanglement faster. We conclude that without decoherence, and given a maximum distance $\Delta x$ between any two spatial states of a superposition, a set of two qubits placed in spatial superposition parallel to one another will outperform all other models given realistic experimental parameters. Furthermore, when a sufficiently high decoherence rate is introduced, multi-component superpositions can outperform the two-qubit set-up. This is further verified with an experimental simulation, showing that $O(10^3)$ measurements are required to reject the no entanglement hypothesis with a parallel qubits set-up without decoherence at a 99.9$\%$ confidence level. The number of measurements increases when decoherence is introduced. When the decoherence rate reaches $0.125$~Hz, 6-dimensional qudits are required as the two-qubit system entanglement cannot be witnessed anymore. However, in this case, $O(10^6)$ measurements will be required. One can group the witness operators to measure in order to reduce the number of measurements (up to ten-fold). However, this may be challenging to implement experimentally.