Would quantum coherence be increased by curvature effect in de Sitter space?

Abstract

We study the quantum coherence in de Sitter space for the bipartite system of Alice and Bob who initially share an entangled state between the two modes of a free massive scalar field. It is shown that the space-curvature effect can produce both local coherence and correlated coherence, leading to the increase of the total coherence of the bipartite system. These results are sharp different from the Unruh effect or Hawking effect, which, in the single mode approximation, cannot produce local coherence and at the same time destroy correlated coherence, leading to the decrease of the total coherence of the bipartite systems. Interestingly, we find that quantum coherence has the opposite behavior compared with the quantum correlation in de Sitter space. We also find that quantum coherence is most severely affected by the curvature effect of de Sitter space for the cases of conformal invariance and masslessness. Our result reveals the difference between the curvature effect in the de Sitter space and the Unruh effect in Rindler spacetime or the Hawking effect in black hole spacetime on quantum coherence.