Gravity-mediated entanglement via infinite-dimensional systems

Abstract There has been a wave of recent interest in detecting the quantum nature of gravity with tabletop experiments that witness gravitationally mediated entanglement. Central to these proposals is the assumption that any mediator capable of generating entanglement must itself be nonclassical. However, previous arguments for this have modelled classical mediators as finite, discrete systems such as bits, which excludes physically relevant continuous and infinite-dimensional systems such as those of classical mechanics and field theory. In this work, we close this gap by modelling classical systems as commutative unital C * -algebras, arguably encompassing all potentially physically relevant classical systems. We show that these systems cannot mediate entanglement between two quantum systems A and B, even if A and B are themselves infinite-dimensional or described by arbitrary unital C * -algebras (as in quantum field theory), composed with an arbitrary C * -tensor product. This result reinforces the conclusion that the observation of gravity-induced entanglement would require the gravitational field to possess inherently non-classical features.