Improving resilience of the Quantum Gravity Induced Entanglement of Masses (QGEM) to decoherence using 3 superpositions

Abstract: Recently a protocol called quantum gravity induced entanglement of masses (QGEM) that aims to test the quantum nature of gravity using the entanglement of 2 qubits was proposed. The entanglement can arise only if the force between the two spatially superposed masses is occurring via the exchange of a mediating virtual graviton. In this paper, we examine a possible improvement of the QGEM setup by introducing a third mass with an embedded qubit, so that there are now 3 qubits to witness the gravitationally generated entanglement. We compare the entanglement generation for different experimental setups with 2 and 3 qubits and find that a 3-qubit setup where the superpositions are parallel to each other leads to the highest rate of entanglement generation within $\tau = 5 $ s. We will show that the 3-qubit setup is more resilient to the higher rate of decoherence. The entanglement can be detected experimentally for the 2-qubit setup if the decoherence rate $\gamma$ is $\gamma < 0.11 $ Hz compared to $\gamma < 0.16 $ Hz for the 3-qubit setup. However, the introduction of an extra qubit means that more measurements are required to characterize entanglement in an experiment. We conduct experimental simulations and estimate that the 3-qubit setup would allow detecting the entanglement in the QGEM protocol at a $99.9\%$ certainty with $O(10^4)-O(10^5)$ measurements when $\gamma \in [0.1,0.15] $ Hz. Furthermore, we find that the number of needed measurements can be reduced to $O(10^3)-O(10^5)$ if the measurement schedule is optimised using joint Pauli basis measurements. For $\gamma > 0.06 $ Hz the 3-qubit setup is favourable compared to the 2-qubit setup in terms of the minimum number of measurements needed to characterize the entanglement. Thus, the proposed setup here provides a promising new avenue for implementing the QGEM experiment.