Entanglement suppression and quantum scars in a three-oscillator gravitational analogue

Abstract: We study quantum correlations in a tripartite system of coupled harmonic oscillators, modeling mediator-induced interactions akin to those in quantum gravity proposals. Surprisingly, despite the system's integrability, we identify regimes where bipartite entanglement between distant oscillators vanishes even with non-zero quantum couplings. In the Heavy Mediator Regime, entanglement is restricted to sharply localized islands in parameter space, surrounded by extended regions of suppression, analogous to quantum scars in non-integrable systems. Fidelity analysis reveal that these low-entanglement states exhibit dynamical stability and spectral signatures reminiscent of quantum scars in non-integrable systems, suggesting a continuous-variable analogue of scarring tied to hidden phase-space symmetries. The Light Mediator Regime, by contrast, displays smooth entanglement generation. These results challenge entanglement-based tests of quantum gravity: the absence of entanglement need not imply classical mediation but may instead reflect a mediator dynamically constrained to a quantum subspace-akin to gravitational memory or decoherence-free subspaces. Our findings emphasize the necessity of probing the mediator's dynamical regime to unambiguously diagnose quantum gravity.