
Harvesting entanglement from the gravitational vacuum
T. Rick Perche,1, 2, 3, ∗Boris Ragula,1, †and Eduardo Mart´ın-Mart´ınez1, 2, 3, ‡
1Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada
2Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 2Y5, Canada
3Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada
We study how quantum systems can harvest entanglement from the quantum degrees of free-
dom of the gravitational field. Concretely, we describe in detail the interaction of non-relativistic
quantum systems with linearized quantum gravity, and explore how two spacelike separated probes
can harvest entanglement from the gravitational field in this context. We provide estimates for the
harvested entanglement for realistic probes which can be experimentally relevant in the future, since
entanglement harvesting experiments can provide evidence for the existence of quantum degrees of
freedom of gravity.
I. INTRODUCTION
Arguably, the most important unsolved question in
theoretical physics is how to give a description for the
gravitational interaction that is consistent with our un-
derstanding of quantum matter. It is well known that the
coupling of classical gravity and quantum matter is theo-
retically inconsistent [1, 2], and as such we either need a
quantum description for gravity or a complete reformula-
tion of quantum theory. However, as of today, there is no
experimental confirmation of quantum behaviour of grav-
ity. Promising experimental setups, such as gravity me-
diated entanglement experiments, have been proposed to
attempt to verify quantum properties of the gravitational
field [3–5]. Despite its promise, there is plenty of debate
regarding which quantum properties of the gravitational
interaction can be confirmed by such experiments [6–12].
The core of this debate lies on how to identify genuinely
quantum degrees of freedom for the gravitational field.
One of the most remarkable differences between theo-
ries for classical and quantum fields is their lowest energy
state. While in a classical field theory, the ground state
corresponds to a zero-valued field, the vacuum state of
a quantum field theory is, arguably, not truly ‘empty’.
This gives rise to non-trivial statistics for local measure-
ments (see e.g. [13–16]). Moreover, it is well known that
the vacuum state of a quantum field contains quantum
correlations between different spacetime regions. This is
true even if these regions are spacelike separated [17, 18].
This fact is a fundamental feature of quantum field the-
ory in both flat and curved spacetimes [19, 20], and is
instrumental to our understanding of phenomena such
as the renormalization of the stress-energy tensor [20],
area laws in quantum field theories [21–25] and black
hole evaporation [26–31].
This vacuum entanglement can actually be detected:
localized probes can become entangled with each other
∗trickperche@perimeterinstitute.ca
†bragula@uwaterloo.ca
‡emartinmartinez@uwaterloo.ca
through the interaction with the field, even when they are
spacelike separated through their interaction. This is the
idea behind the protocol of entanglement harvesting [32–
34]. In recent years, the protocol has been extensively
studied in many different scenarios [35–45], when probes
are coupled to different field operators [46, 47] and in
different spacetimes [48–53].
Entanglement harvesting from spacelike separated re-
gions is only possible from a field with quantum degrees
of freedom: a classical field cannot contain entanglement
that can be extracted. This fact can be used to decide
whether a field is classical or quantum. In fact, it has
been argued that an entanglement harvesting protocol
for the gravitational field can be used to witness quan-
tum gravity (see, e.g., [12, 54]). The main goal of this
manuscript is to perform a detailed study of this setup,
and to quantify the theoretical amount of entanglement
that could be extracted from a weak gravitational quan-
tum field.
Previous studies of entanglement harvesting which
take gravity degrees of freedom into consideration typi-
cally only couple to a scalar quantum field [55, 56]. That
is, the effect of gravity in the protocol is indirect, so that
the detectors are still coupled to the scalar field in a clas-
sical background spacetime. However, to the authors’
knowledge no previous work has considered entanglement
harvesting directly from a quantum gravitational field.
This manuscript is organized as follows. In Section II
we review the protocol of entanglement harvesting us-
ing two spacelike separated probes. In Section III we
review the formalism of linearized quantum gravity, and
describe how non-relativistic quantum systems couple to
a weak gravitational field. The protocol of entanglement
harvesting from the gravitational field is described in Sec-
tion IV. We present our first examples of entanglement
harvesting from the gravitational field in Section V. In
Section VI we compare the results found for the grav-
itational field with scalar model analogues. In Section
VII we study atoms coupled to quantum gravity in the
linearized regime. The conclusions of our work can be
found in Section VIII.
arXiv:2210.14921v2 [quant-ph] 18 Nov 2023