Entanglement harvesting from the electromagnetic vacuum with hydrogenlike atoms

We study how two fully featured hydrogenlike atoms harvest entanglement from the electromagnetic field vacuum, even when the atoms are spacelike separated. We compare the electromagnetic case-qualitatively and quantitatively-with previous results that used scalar fields and featureless, idealized atomic models. Our study reveals the new traits that emerge when we relax these idealizations, such as anisotropies in entanglement harvesting and the effect of exchange of angular momentum. We show that, under certain circumstances, relaxing previous idealizations makes vacuum entanglement harvesting more efficient.