Detector Based Evaluation of Extractable Entanglement in Flat spacetime
Abstract
Entanglement entropy (EE) is widely used to quantify quantum correlations in field theory, with the well-known result in two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) predicting a logarithmic divergence with the ultraviolet (UV) cutoff. However, this expression lacks operational meaning: it remains unclear how much of the entanglement is physically extractable via local measurements. In this work, we investigate the operationally accessible entanglement by employing a pair of Unruh-DeWitt detectors, each interacting with complementary regions of a quantum field. We derive an upper bound on the entanglement that can be harvested by such detectors and show that it scales as a double logarithm with respect to the UV cutoff-significantly weaker than the single-logarithmic divergence of the standard CFT result. This work provides an operational perspective on field-theoretic entanglement and sets fundamental limits on its extractability.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.15716,
title = {Detector Based Evaluation of Extractable Entanglement in Flat spacetime},
author = {Hiromasa Tajima and Riku Yoshimoto and Ryo Nemoto and Yuki Osawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.15716},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
5 pages, No figure