Qudits for witnessing quantum-gravity-induced entanglement of masses under decoherence

Recently, a theoretical and an experimental protocol known as quantum-gravity-induced entanglement of masses (QGEM) has been proposed to test the quantum nature of gravity using two mesoscopic masses, each placed in a superposition of two locations. If after eliminating all nongravitational interactions between them the particles become entangled, one can conclude that the gravitational potential is induced via a quantum mediator, i.e., graviton. In this paper we explore extensions of the QGEM experiment to multidimensional quantum objects and examine a range of different experiment geometries, in order to determine which would generate entanglement faster. We conclude that when a sufficiently high decoherence rate is introduced, multicomponent superpositions can outperform the two-qubit setup. With low decoherence however, and given a maximum distance Δx between any two spatial states of a superposition, a set of two qubits placed in spatial superposition parallel to one another will outperform all other models given realistic experimental parameters. This is further verified with an experiment simulation, showing that O(103) measurements are required to reject the no-entanglement hypothesis with a parallel-qubit setup without decoherence at a 99.9% confidence level. The number of measurements increases when decoherence is introduced. When the decoherence rate reaches 0.125 Hz, six-dimensional qudits are required as the two-qubit system entanglement cannot be witnessed anymore. However, in this case, O(106) measurements will be required. One can group the witness operators to measure in order to reduce the number of measurements (up to tenfold). However, this may be challenging to implement experimentally.