Quantum entanglement in cosmology

Abstract

We discuss recent progress in the study of entanglement within cosmological frameworks, focusing on both momentum and position-space approaches and also reviewing the possibility to directly extract entanglement from quantum fields. Entanglement generation in expanding spacetimes can be traced back to the phenomenon of gravitational particle production, according to which the background gravitational field may transfer energy and momentum to quantum fields. The corresponding entanglement amount and its mode dependence are both sensitive to the field statistics and to the details of spacetime expansion, thus encoding information about the background. Gravitational production processes also play a key role in addressing the quantum-to-classical transition of cosmological perturbations. In order to directly extract entanglement from quantum fields, local interactions with additional quantum systems, working as detectors, have been suggested, leading to the formulation of the entanglement harvesting protocol. Despite harvesting procedures are currently unfeasible from an experimental point of view, various proposals for implementation exist and a proper modeling of detectors and local interactions is crucial to address entanglement extraction via realistic setups. In the final part of the work, we address entanglement characterization in position space, primarily focusing on black hole spacetimes. We first investigate a possible interpretation of Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy in terms of the entanglement entropy arising in discrete quantum field theories, on account of the area law. Then, we discuss the resolution of the black hole information paradox via the gravitational fine-grained entropy formula, which provides a new way to compute the entropy of Hawking radiation and allows to preserve unitarity in black hole evaporation processes.