The particles produced from the vacuum in the dynamical Casimir effect are highly entangled. In order to quantify the correlations generated by the process of vacuum decay induced by moving mirrors, we study the entanglement evolution in the dynamical Casimir effect by computing the time-dependent Rényi and von Neumann entanglement entropy analytically in arbitrary dimensions. We consider the system at parametric resonance, where the effect is enhanced. We find that, in ($1+1$) dimensions, the entropies grow logarithmically for large times, $S_A(\tau )\sim \frac{1}{2}\log (\tau )$, while in higher dimensions ($n+1$) the growth is linear, $S_A(t)\sim \lambda \tau$, where $\lambda$ can be identified with the Lyapunov exponent of a classical instability in the system. In ($1+1$) dimensions, strong interactions among field modes prevent the parametric resonance from manifesting as a Lyapunov instability, leading to a sublinear entropy growth associated with a constant rate of particle production in the resonant mode. Interestingly, the logarithmic growth comes with a prefactor of $1/2$ which cannot occur in time-periodic systems with finitely many degrees of freedom and is thus a special property of bosonic field theories.

• Received 9 August 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.065022