Alice falls into a black hole: Entanglement in non-inertial frames

I. Fuentes-Schuller, R. B. Mann

Published 2004-10-21, updated 2005-07-28Version 3

Two observers determine the entanglement between two free bosonic modes by each detecting one of the modes and observing the correlations between their measurements. We show that a state which is maximally entangled in an inertial frame becomes less entangled if the observers are relatively accelerated. This phenomenon, which is a consequence of the Unruh effect, shows that entanglement is an observer-dependent quantity in non-inertial frames. In the high acceleration limit, our results can be applied to a non-accelerated observer falling into a black hole while the accelerated one barely escapes. If the observer escapes with infinite acceleration, the state's distillable entanglement vanishes.