Semiclassical gravity phenomenology under the causal-conditional quantum measurement prescription. II. Heisenberg picture and apparent optical entanglement

The evolution of quantum states influenced by semiclassical gravity is distinct from that in quantum gravity theory due to the presence of a state-dependent gravitational potential. This state-dependent potential introduces nonlinearity into the state evolution, of which the theory is named the Schrödinger-Newton (SN) theory. The formalism for understanding the continuous quantum measurement process on the quantum state in the context of semiclassical gravity theory has been previously discussed using the Schrödinger picture in Paper I [Semiclassical gravity phenomenology under the causal-conditional quantum measurement prescription, Semiclassical gravity phenomenology under the causal-conditional quantum measurement prescriptionPhys. Rev. D 107, 024004 (2023).]. In this work, an equivalent formalism using the Heisenberg picture is developed and applied to the analysis of two optomechanical experiment protocols that targeted testing the quantum nature of gravity. This Heisenberg picture formalism of the SN theory has the advantage of helping the investigation of the covariance matrices of the outgoing light fields in these protocols and further the entanglement features. We found that the classical gravity between the quantum trajectories of two mirrors under continuous quantum measurement in the SN theory can induce an apparent entanglement of the outgoing light field (though there is no quantum entanglement of the mirrors), which could serve as a false alarm for those experiments designed for probing the quantum gravity induced entanglement.