Accessible and inaccessible quantum coherence in relativistic quantum systems

The quantum coherence of a multipartite system is investigated when some of the parties are moving with uniform acceleration and the analysis is carried out using the single-mode approximation. Due to acceleration the quantum coherence is divided into two parts as accessible and inaccessible coherence. First we investigate tripartite systems, considering both GHZ and W states. We find that the quantum coherence of these states does not vanish in the limit of infinite acceleration, rather asymptoting to a nonzero value. These results hold for both single-and two-qubit acceleration. In the GHZ and W states the coherence is distributed as correlations between the qubits and is known as global coherence. However, quantum coherence can also exist due to the superposition within a qubit, the local coherence. To study the properties of local coherence we investigate a separable state. The GHZ state, W state, and separable states contain only one type of coherence. Next we consider the WW¯ and star states in which both local and global coherences coexist. We find that under uniform acceleration both local and global coherence show similar qualitative behavior. Finally, we derive analytic expressions for the quantum coherence of N-partite GHZ and W states for n<N accelerating qubits. We find that the quantum coherence of a multipartite GHZ state falls exponentially with the number of accelerated qubits, whereas for multipartite W states the quantum coherence decreases only polynomially. We conclude that W states are more robust to Unruh decoherence and discuss some potential applications in satellite-based quantum communication and black-hole physics.