Contextuality from the vacuum

Abstract

Contextuality, a key resource for quantum advantage, describes systems in which the outcome of a measurement is not independent of other compatible measurements, in contrast to classical hidden-variable descriptions. We investigate the harvesting of contextuality from the vacuum of a quantum field using Unruh-DeWitt detectors. We show that localized 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 show that contextuality is a resource that can be extracted directly from the quantum vacuum and establish contextuality harvesting as a fundamental phenomenon in relativistic quantum information.