The ATLAS Collaboration has recently announced the first observation of quantum entanglement in top quark pair production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This work briefly reviews the experimental status of top quark pair spin correlations and highlights the distinctions between classical and quantum correlations. A proposed criterion for detecting spin entanglement in top quark pairs is outlined, along with the experimental strategy to observe this effect, culminating in the positive results of the ATLAS measurement.
The ATLAS Collaboration has recently announced the first observation of quantum entanglement in top quark pair production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This work briefly reviews the experimental status of top quark pair spin correlations and highlights the distinctions between classical and quantum correlations. A proposed criterion for detecting spin entanglement in top quark pairs is outlined, along with the experimental strategy to observe this effect, culminating in the positive results of the ATLAS measurement.
Abstract Entanglement is a key feature of quantum mechanics1–3, with applications in fields such as metrology, cryptography, quantum information and quantum computation4–8. It has been observed in a wide variety of systems and length scales, ranging from the microscopic9–13 to the macroscopic14–16. However, entanglement remains largely unexplored at the highest accessible energy scales. Here we report the highest-energy observation of entanglement, in top–antitop quark events produced at the Large Hadron Collider, using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 inverse femtobarns (fb)−1 recorded with the ATLAS experiment. Spin entanglement is detected from the measurement of a single observable D, inferred from the angle between the charged leptons in their parent top- and antitop-quark rest frames. The observable is measured in a narrow interval around the top–antitop quark production threshold, at which the entanglement detection is expected to be significant. It is reported in a fiducial phase space defined with stable particles to minimize the uncertainties that stem from the limitations of the Monte Carlo event generators and the parton shower model in modelling top-quark pair production. The entanglement marker is measured to be D = −0.537 ± 0.002 (stat.) ± 0.019 (syst.) for 340GeV<mttˉ<380GeV 340 GeV < m t t ¯ < 380 GeV . The observed result is more than five standard deviations from a scenario without entanglement and hence constitutes the first observation of entanglement in a pair of quarks and the highest-energy observation of entanglement so far.
Entanglement is a key feature of quantum mechanics1,2,3, with applications in fields such as metrology, cryptography, quantum information and quantum computation4,5,6,7,8. It has been observed in a wide variety of systems and length scales, ranging from the microscopic9,10,11,12,13 to the macroscopic14,15,16. However, entanglement remains largely unexplored at the highest accessible energy scales. Here we report the highest-energy observation of entanglement, in top–antitop quark events produced at the Large Hadron Collider, using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of s=13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 inverse femtobarns (fb)−1 recorded with the ATLAS experiment. Spin entanglement is detected from the measurement of a single observable D, inferred from the angle between the charged leptons in their parent top- and antitop-quark rest frames. The observable is measured in a narrow interval around the top–antitop quark production threshold, at which the entanglement detection is expected to be significant. It is reported in a fiducial phase space defined with stable particles to minimize the uncertainties that stem from the limitations of the Monte Carlo event generators and the parton shower model in modelling top-quark pair production. The entanglement marker is measured to be D=−0.537±0.002 (stat.)±0.019 (syst.) for . The observed result is more than five standard deviations from a scenario without entanglement and hence constitutes the first observation of entanglement in a pair of quarks and the highest-energy observation of entanglement so far.
Entanglement is a key feature of quantum mechanics1–3, with applications in fields such as metrology, cryptography, quantum information and quantum computation4–8. It has been observed in a wide variety of systems and length scales, ranging from the microscopic9–13 to the macroscopic14–16. However, entanglement remains largely unexplored at the highest accessible energy scales. Here we report the highest-energy observation of entanglement, in top–antitop quark events produced at the Large Hadron Collider, using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 inverse femtobarns (fb)−1 recorded with the ATLAS experiment. Spin entanglement is detected from the measurement of a single observable D, inferred from the angle between the charged leptons in their parent top- and antitop-quark rest frames. The observable is measured in a narrow interval around the top–antitop quark production threshold, at which the entanglement detection is expected to be significant. It is reported in a fiducial phase space defined with stable particles to minimize the uncertainties that stem from the limitations of the Monte Carlo event generators and the parton shower model in modelling top-quark pair production. The entanglement marker is measured to be D = −0.537 ± 0.002 (stat.) ± 0.019 (syst.) for 340GeV
It has been shown that entanglement and Bell nonlocality, which are key concepts in quantum mechanics, can be probed in high-energy colliders via processes of fundamental particle scattering. In fact, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations have measured entanglement using top-quark pairs produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. Recently, it was shown that spin correlations can be measured in pairs of bottom quarks at the LHC, despite the fact that bottom quarks, unlike top quarks, hadronize before decaying. Here, we demonstrate that quantum correlations can also be studied using bottom-quark pairs, and analyze the feasibility of the observation of entanglement and Bell nonlocality in several collider experiments. Given the low mass of the bottom quark relative to typical energies accessible at the LHC, many of the bottom-quark pairs are in the ultrarelativistic regime, where they can exhibit strong spin entanglement. We find that entanglement of bottom-quark pairs may be measurable even with the LHC Run 2 data, especially with the CMS B parking dataset, while observation of Bell nonlocality may become feasible at the high-luminosity phase of the LHC.
Entanglement is an intrinsic property of quantum mechanics and is predicted to be exhibited in the particles produced at the Large Hadron Collider. A measurement of the extent of entanglement in top quark-antiquark (t¯t) events produced in proton–proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV is performed with the data recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC in 2016, and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.3 fb−1 . The events are selected based on the presence of two leptons with opposite charges and high transverse momentum. An entanglement-sensitive observable D is derived from the top quark spin-dependent parts of the t¯t production density matrix and measured in the region of the t¯t production threshold. Values of D < −1/3 are evidence of entanglement and D is observed (expected) to be −0.480+0.026 −0.029 (−0.467+0.026 −0.029) at the parton level. With an observed significance of 5.1 standard deviations with respect to the non-entangled hypothesis, this provides observation of quantum mechanical entanglement within t¯t pairs in this phase space. This measurement provides a new probe of quantum mechanics at the highest energies ever produced.