Irreversible degradation of quantum coherence under relativistic motion

Abstract

We study the dynamics of quantum coherence under Unruh thermal noise and seek under which condition the coherence can be frozen in a relativistic setting. We find that the frozen condition is either (i) the initial state is prepared as an incoherence state or (ii) the detectors have no interaction with the external field. That is to say, the decoherence of the detectors' quantum state is irreversible under the influence of thermal noise induced by Unruh radiation. It is shown that quantum coherence approaches zero only in the limit of an infinite acceleration, while quantum entanglement could reduce to zero for a finite acceleration. It is also demonstrated that the robustness of quantum coherence is better than entanglement under the influence of the atom-field interaction for an extremely large acceleration. Therefore, quantum coherence is more robust than entanglement in an accelerating system and the coherence-type quantum resources are more accessible for relativistic quantum information processing tasks.