Contextuality from the vacuum

Abstract: Contextuality, a key resource for quantum advantage, is a phenomenon where the outcome of a measurement is not independent of other compatible measurements, violating the premise of classical hidden variable descriptions of the theory. We investigate the harvesting of contextuality from the vacuum of a quantum field using Unruh-DeWitt detectors. We show that interactions with the field can endow initially non-contextual detectors with contextuality with respect to Heisenberg-Weyl measurements, as quantified by contextual fraction. The harvested contextuality correlates with the emergence of Wigner function negativity, in agreement with known equivalences between these notions. Our results establish contextuality harvesting as a fundamental phenomenon in relativistic quantum information, highlighting it as a resource that can be extracted directly from the quantum vacuum.