Entanglement from the vacuum

We explore the entanglement of the vacuum of a relativistic field by letting a pair of causally disconnected probes interact with the field. We find that, even when the probes are initially non-entangled, they can wind up to a final entangled state. This shows that entanglement persists between disconnected regions in the vacuum. However the probe entanglement, unlike correlations, vanishes once the regions become sufficiently separated. The relation between entropy, correlations and entanglement is discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, Latex2e, see also quant-ph/0008006. To appear in a special issue of Foundations of Physics in honor of Jacob Bekenstei

Spatial structures and localization of vacuum entanglement in the linear harmonic chain

We study the structure of vacuum entanglement for two complimentary segments of a linear harmonic chain, applying the modewise decomposition of entangled gaussian states discussed in \cite {modewise}. We find that the resulting entangled mode shape hierarchy shows a distinctive layered structure with well defined relations between the depth of the modes, their characteristic wavelength, and their entanglement contribution. We re-derive in the strong coupling (diverging correlation length) regime, the logarithmic dependence of entanglement on the segment size predicted by conformal field theory for the boson universality class, and discuss its relation with the mode structure. We conjecture that the persistence of vacuum entanglement between arbitrarily separated finite size regions is connected with the localization of the highest frequency innermost modes.Comment: 23 pages, 19 figures, RevTex4. High resolution figures available upon request. New References adde

On the efficiency of nonlocal gates generation

We propose and study a method for using non-maximally entangled states to implement probabilistically non-local gates. Unlike distillation-based protocols, this method does not generate a maximally entangled state at intermediate stages of the process. As a consequences, the method becomes more efficient at a certain range of parameters. Gates of the form $\exp[i\xi\sigma_{n_A}\sigma_{n_B}]$ with $\xi\ll1$, can be implemented with nearly unit probability and with vanishingly small entanglement, while for the distillation-based method the gate is produced with a vanishing success probability. We also derive an upper bound to the optimal success probability and show that in the small entanglement limit, the bound is tight.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure