We study the harvesting of entanglement and mutual information by Unruh-DeWitt particle detectors from thermal and squeezed coherent field states. We prove (for arbitrary spatial dimensions, switching profiles and detector smearings) that while the entanglement harvesting ability of detectors decreases monotonically with the field temperature $T$, harvested mutual information grows linearly with $T$. We also show that entanglement harvesting from a general squeezed coherent state is independent of the coherent amplitude, but depends strongly on the squeezing amplitude. Moreover, we find that highly squeezed states (i) allow for detectors to harvest much more entanglement than from the vacuum, and (ii) ensure that the entanglement harvested does not decay with their spatial separation. Finally, we analyze the spatial inhomogeneity of squeezed states and its influence on harvesting, and investigate how much entanglement one can actually extract from squeezed states when the squeezing is bandlimited.

• Received 14 September 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.085007