Directional effects of the Unruh effect on steering harvesting
Abstract
We investigate directional quantum steering harvesting by two uniformly accelerated non-identical Unruh-DeWitt detectors coupled to a massless scalar field in the Minkowski vacuum. We show that the Unruh effect does not simply degrade harvested steering, but can reshape its directionality in a strongly parameter-dependent manner. At low detector energy scales, acceleration predominantly suppresses steering, whereas at higher energy scales, moderate acceleration can enhance steering and even activate an initially absent steering direction. Most strikingly, within a finite acceleration window, the Unruh effect enhances steering in one direction while simultaneously suppressing it in the opposite direction, revealing an intrinsically directional influence of relativistic acceleration. Detector non-identicality provides an additional control mechanism: a moderate energy-gap mismatch can enhance or activate one steering direction while suppressing the reverse one, whereas sufficiently large energy-gap mismatch suppresses the harvested steering. Moreover, the maximal steering asymmetry approximately marks the transition from two-way to one-way steering. Our results establish relativistic acceleration and detector non-identicality as means of controlling the strength and directionality of vacuum-harvested quantum correlations.
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BibTeX
@misc{wu2026directional,
title = {{Directional effects of the Unruh effect on steering harvesting}},
author = {Shu-Min Wu and Rui-Yang Xu and Zhihong Liu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.20151},
eprint = {2610.20151},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20151},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Directional effects of the Unruh effect on steering harvesting
AU - Shu-Min Wu
AU - Rui-Yang Xu
AU - Zhihong Liu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.20151
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20151
AB - We investigate directional quantum steering harvesting by two uniformly accelerated non-identical Unruh-DeWitt detectors coupled to a massless scalar field in the Minkowski vacuum. We show that the Unruh effect does not simply degrade harvested steering, but can reshape its directionality in a strongly parameter-dependent manner. At low detector energy scales, acceleration predominantly suppresses steering, whereas at higher energy scales, moderate acceleration can enhance steering and even activate an initially absent steering direction. Most strikingly, within a finite acceleration window, the Unruh effect enhances steering in one direction while simultaneously suppressing it in the opposite direction, revealing an intrinsically directional influence of relativistic acceleration. Detector non-identicality provides an additional control mechanism: a moderate energy-gap mismatch can enhance or activate one steering direction while suppressing the reverse one, whereas sufficiently large energy-gap mismatch suppresses the harvested steering. Moreover, the maximal steering asymmetry approximately marks the transition from two-way to one-way steering. Our results establish relativistic acceleration and detector non-identicality as means of controlling the strength and directionality of vacuum-harvested quantum correlations.
ER -