Abstract

A dispersive medium becomes entangled with zero-point fluctuations in the vacuum. We consider an arbitrary array of material bodies weakly interacting with a quantum field and compute the quantum mutual information between them. It is shown that the mutual information in D dimensions can be mapped to classical thermodynamic entropy in D + 1 dimensions. As a specific example, we compute the mutual information both analytically and numerically for a range of separation distances between two bodies in D = 2 dimensions and find a logarithmic correction to the area law at short separations. A key advantage of our method is that it allows the strong subadditivity property to be easily verified.

Publication Details
Publication Type
Journal Article
Year of Publication
2015
Volume
114
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.151602
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Contributors
Groups
Date Published
05/2014