Effect of environment-induced interatomic interaction on entanglement generation for uniformly accelerated atoms with a boundary

Abstract

Considering environment-induced interatomic interaction, we study the entanglement dynamics of two uniformly accelerated atoms that interact with fluctuating massless scalar fields in the Minkowski vacuum in the presence of a reflecting boundary. The two atoms are initially prepared in a state such that one is in the ground state and the other is in the excited state, which is separable. When the acceleration is small, the rate of entanglement generation at the initial time and the maximum of concurrence generated during evolution oscillate with the distance between the atoms and the boundary before reaching a stable value, and may decrease non-monotonically with the acceleration, which means the anti-Unruh phenomenon can exist for some situations even when environmental considerations are taken into account. The results show that there exists the competition of the vacuum fluctuations caused by the boundary and the acceleration. In addition, the time evolution of concurrence will not be affected by the environment-induced interatomic interaction under certain conditions. For a larger acceleration, when the environment-induced interatomic interaction is considered, the concurrence may disappear later compared with the result when the environment-induced interatomic interaction is neglected.