Entanglement and Symmetry Structure of N(= 3) Quantum Oscillators with Disparate Coupling Strengths in a Common Quantum Field Bath

Abstract

In this paper, we study the entanglement structure of a system of N quantum oscillators with distinctive coupling strengths, all linearly coupled to a common massless scalar quantum field. This study is helpful in characterizing the notion of an entanglement domain and its symmetry features, which is useful for understanding the interplay between different levels of structure in many-body quantum systems. The effect of the quantum field on the system is derived via the influence functional and the correlation functions are obtained from the solutions of the evolutionary operator of the reduced density matrix. They are then used to construct the covariance matrix, which forms the basis for our analysis of the structure of quantum entanglement in this open system. To make the physical features explicit, we consider a system of three quantum coupled oscillators placed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle with disparate pairwise couplings. We analyze the entanglement between one oscillator and the other two with equal (symmetric) and unequal (asymmetric) coupling strengths. As a physical illustration, we apply the results for these two different configurations to address some basic issues in macroscopic quantum phenomena from the quantum entanglement perspective.