Boiling Quantum Vacuum: Thermal Subsystems from Ground-State Entanglement

Boiling Quantum Vacuum: Thermal Subsystems from Ground-State Entanglement

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In certain special circumstances, such as in the vicinity of a black hole or in a uniformly accelerating frame, vacuum fluctuations appear to give rise to a finite-temperature environment.This effect, currently without experimental confirmation, can be interpreted as a manifestation of quantum entanglement after tracing out vacuum modes in an unobserved region.In this work, we identify Cassette Players a class of experimentally accessible quantum systems where thermal density matrices emerge from vacuum entanglement.

We show that reduced density matrices of lower-dimensional subsystems embedded in D-dimensional gapped Dirac fermion vacuum, either on a lattice or continuum, have a thermal form with respect to a lower-dimensional Dirac Hamiltonian.Strikingly, we show that vacuum entanglement can Toy Storage even conspire to make a subsystem of a gapped system at zero temperature appear as a hot gapless system.We propose concrete experiments in cold-atom quantum simulators to observe the vacuum-entanglement-induced thermal states.