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arXiv:2401.02778

Quantum ballet by gravitational waves: Generating entanglement's dance of revival-collapse and memory within the quantum system

Partha Nandi, Bibhas Ranjan Majhi, Debnath, Nandita, Subhajit Kala

Published Jan 5, 2024• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Recent proposals are emerging for the experimental detection of entanglement mediated by classical gravity, carrying significant theoretical and observational implications. In fact, the detection of gravitational waves (GWs) in LIGO provides an alternative laboratory for testing various gravity-related properties. By employing LIGO's arms as oscillators interacting with gravitational waves (GWs), our study demonstrates the potential for generating quantum entanglement between two mutually orthogonal modes of simple harmonic oscillators. Our findings reveal unique entanglement dynamics, including periodic "collapse and revival" influenced by GW oscillations, alongside a distinct "quantum memory effect." Effectively, each harmonic oscillator feels a temperature. We believe that these forecasts may hold significance towards both theoretically probing and experimentally verifying various properties of classical gravitational waves.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2401.02778

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Combining gravity with quantum mechanics remains one of the biggest challenges of physics. In the past years, experiments with optomechanical systems have been proposed that may give indirect clues about the quantum nature of gravity. In a recent variation of such tests [Carney et al., PRX Quantum 2, 030330 (2021)], the authors propose to gravitationally entangle an atom interferometer with a mesoscopic oscillator. The interaction results in periodic drops and revivals of the interferometeric visibility, which under specific assumptions indicate the gravitational generation of entanglement. Here, we study semiclassical models of the atom interferometer that can reproduce the same effect. We show that the core signature---periodic collapses and revivals of the visibility---can appear if the atom is subject to a random unitary channel, including the case where the oscillator is fully classical and situations even without explicit modeling of the oscillator. We also show that the nonclassicality of the oscillator vanishes unless the system is very close to its ground state, and even when the system is in the ground state, the nonclassicality is limited by the coupling strength. Our results thus indicate that deducing entanglement from the proposed experiment is very challenging, since fulfilling and verifying the nonclassicality assumptions constitute a significant challenge in their own right.
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Quantum information concepts and quantum technologies have opened the prospect of probing the quantum nature of gravity in table-top experiments. Most proposals rely on detecting gravitationally mediated entanglement, which requires measurements on both interacting systems. Here we propose an alternative test based on witnessing quantum memory effects in the dynamics of a single system. We show how the quantum memory concept allows the non-classicality of the interaction between two systems to be certified through local measurements on only one of them. We then develop a novel quantum memory witness, making the approach applicable to gravitationally coupled harmonic oscillators. This witness requires no assumptions about the dynamics, such as Gaussianity. Our results show that the quantumness of gravitational dynamics can be certified with access to only one subsystem, opening the door to asymmetric implementations that can offer conceptual and experimental advantages to probing the quantum nature of the gravitational interaction.