A team of theoretical physicists has derived a general Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) master equation describing the joint behaviour of two co-located two-level detectors undergoing uniform acceleration and weakly coupled to scalar fields in the Minkowski vacuum. The formulation retains both coherent and dissipative contributions, and holds for arbitrary detector orientations, any field mass, and any spacetime dimension.

The work belongs to a research line investigating how accelerated motion and the structure of the quantum vacuum affect coherence and entanglement between detectors, a terrain where the Unruh effect and quantum thermalisation phenomena have been hotly debated. Until now, available descriptions were largely restricted to simplified configurations —specific orientations, massless fields, or particular dimensions— preventing a unified analysis of the role of geometry and field mass in the system dynamics.

For the specific case of two detectors with equal orientation coupled to massless scalar fields in four dimensions, the authors explicitly determine the stationary states and quantify their entanglement via concurrence. The result depends markedly on the type of coupling considered: with symmetric coupling, concurrence varies with acceleration, whereas with rotating-wave coupling the concurrence turns out to be independent of acceleration.

The discrepancy between the two couplings underscores that entanglement dynamics in the vacuum is not universal but depends critically on how the detectors are bound to the field. The general master equation paves the way to exploring more realistic configurations —arbitrary relative orientations, massive fields, and spacetime dimensions other than four— as well as to examining whether entanglement can be robustly extracted from the vacuum in experimental scenarios of accelerated detectors.