Entanglement Harvesting with a Twist

Abstract: One consequence of the cosmic censorship conjecture is that any topological structure will ultimately collapse to within the horizons of a set of black holes, and as a result, an external classical observer will be unable to probe it. However a single two-level quantum system (UDW detector) that remains outside of the horizon has been shown to distinguish between a black hole and its associated geon counterpart via its different response rates. Here we extend this investigation of the quantum vacuum outside of an $\mathbb{RP}_2$ geon by considering the entanglement structure of the vacuum state of a quantum scalar field in this spacetime, and how this differs from its BTZ black hole counterpart. Employing the entanglement harvesting protocol, where field entanglement is swapped to a pair of UDW detectors, we find that the classically hidden topology of the geon can have an appreciable difference in the amount of entanglement harvested in the two spacetimes for sufficiently small mass. In this regime, we find that detectors with a small energy gap harvest more entanglement in the BTZ spacetime; however as the energy gap increases, the detectors harvest more entanglement in a geon spacetime. The energy gap at the crossover is dependent on the black hole mass, occurring at a lower values for lower masses. This also impacts the size of the entanglement shadow, the region near the horizon where the detectors cannot harvest entanglement. Small gap detectors experience a larger entanglement shadow in a geon spacetime, whereas for large gap detectors the shadow is larger in a BTZ spacetime.