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arXiv:2110.10112 · The European Physical Journal C

Quantum tops at the LHC: from entanglement to Bell inequalities

Claudio Severi, C. Degli Esposti Boschi, Fabio Maltoni B, Maximiliano Sioli

Published Apr 1, 2022• 120 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract We present the prospects of detecting quantum entanglement and the violation of Bell inequalities in $$t\bar{t}$$ t t ¯ events at the LHC. We introduce a unique set of observables suitable for both measurements, and then perform the corresponding analyses using simulated events in the dilepton final state, reconstructing up to the unfolded level. We find that entanglement can be established at better than $$5 \sigma $$ 5 σ both at threshold as well as at high $$p_T$$ p T already in the LHC Run 2 dataset. On the other hand, only very high- $$p_T$$ p T events are sensitive to a violation of Bell inequalities, making it significantly harder to observe experimentally. By employing a sensitive and robust observable, two different unfolding methods and independent statistical approaches, we conclude that, at variance with previous estimates, testing Bell inequalities will be challenging even in the high luminosity LHC run.

DOI
10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10245-9

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A bstract Quantum entanglement is a fundamental property of quantum mechanics. Recently, studies have explored entanglement in the tt‾ t\overline{t} tt t t ¯ system at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when both the top quark and anti-top quark decay leptonically. Entanglement is detected via correlations between the polarizations of the top and anti-top and these polarizations are measured through the angles of the decay products of the top and anti-top. In this work, we propose searching for evidence of quantum entanglement in the semi-leptonic decay channel where the final state includes one lepton, one neutrino, two b -flavor tagged jets, and two light jets from the W decay. We find that this channel is both easier to reconstruct and has a larger effective quantity of data than the fully leptonic channel. As a result, the semi-leptonic channel is 60% more sensitive to quantum entanglement and a factor of 3 more sensitive to Bell inequality violation, compared to the leptonic channel. In 139 fb − 1 (3 ab −1 ) of data at the LHC (HL-LHC), it should be feasible to measure entanglement at a precision of ≲ 3% (0 . 7%). Detecting Bell inequality violation, on the other hand, is more challenging. With 300 fb −1 (3 ab −1 ) of integrated luminosity at the LHC Run-3 (HL-LHC), we expect a sensitivity of 1 . 3 σ (4 . 1 σ ). In our study, we utilize a realistic parametric fitting procedure to optimally recover the true angular distributions from detector effects. Compared to unfolding this procedure yields more stable results.
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Abstract Recent studies have shown that observing entangled particle states at a particle collider, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and testing the violation of Bell inequality in them can open up new research areas for studying high energy physics. We examine the presence of quantum entanglement in the process at leading order. We apply a generally recognized method, quantum state tomography, to reconstruct the spin density matrix of the joint ZZ system, through which all the relevant observables can be obtained. The angular distribution of the final leptons is obtained from simulated events using a Monte-Carlo program, which is used to reconstruct the spin density matrix. A non-zero value of the lower bound of the concurrence is measured with the simulated data. The numerical analysis shows that, with the luminosity corresponding to LHC Run 2+3, entanglement can be probed at the 2 level and up to the 3.75 level for High-Luminosity LHC data (3ab -1 ), revealing the possibility of finding quantum entanglement in real collider experiments.