Abstract
If gravitational perturbations are quantized into gravitons in analogy with the electromagnetic field and photons, the resulting graviton interactions should lead to an entangling interaction between massive objects. We suggest a test of this prediction. To do this, we introduce the concept of interactive quantum information sensing. This novel sensing protocol is tailored to provable verification of weak dynamical entanglement generation between a pair of systems. We show that this protocol is highly robust to typical thermal noise sources. The sensitivity can moreover be increased both using an initial thermal state and/or an initial phase of entangling via a non-gravitational interaction. We outline a concrete implementation testing the ability of the gravitational field to generate entanglement between an atomic interferometer and mechanical oscillator. Preliminary numerical estimates suggest that near-term devices could feasibly be used to perform the experiment.
Highlights
If a particle is in a superposition of two locations, will its gravitational field be in a superposition and can this field generate entanglement with another system? This foundational question [1,2] has received considerable attention [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
We propose a concrete implementation based on atom interferometry [20,21,22,23], in which an atom in a superpositon of being in one of two interferometer arms interacts with a low-frequency mechanical
We find the remarkable result that using an initial state at high temperature can increase the sensitivity of the protocol, because it can increase the rate of entanglement generation and lead to a thermally enhanced collapseand-revival signal
Summary
If a particle is in a superposition of two locations, will its gravitational field be in a superposition and can this field generate entanglement with another system? This foundational question [1,2] has received considerable attention [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The ability to test such a weak entanglement signal relies entirely on our central technical result, a novel sensing protocol that we refer to as interactive quantum information sensing. This is a detection scheme tailored to the verification of weak dynamical entanglement generation. If the same interaction can cause both decoherence and recoherence of A, in a manner controlled by B, for certain classes of systems, we prove that the interaction is necessarily capable of generating entanglement between subsystems A and B This protocol provides an indirect test of the quantum communication capabilities of the two systems and is a limited probe of the family of quantum channels associated with the interaction between the two systems.
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