Entanglement and Bell inequalities with boosted <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mi>t</mml:mi><mml:mover accent="true"><mml:mi>t</mml:mi><mml:mo stretchy="false">¯</mml:mo></mml:mover></mml:math>
Zhongtian Dong, Dorival Gonçalves, Kyoungchul Kong, Alberto Navarro
Abstract
The Large Hadron Collider provides a unique opportunity to study quantum entanglement and violation of Bell inequalities at the highest energy available today. In this paper, we will investigate these quantum correlations with top quark pair production, which represents a system of two-qubits. The semileptonic top pair channel has a factor of 6 increase in statistics and easier reconstruction with respect to the dileptonic channel. Although measuring the spin polarization of the hadronic top quark is known to be challenging, our study indicates that it is feasible to reconstruct the spin density matrix of the two-qubit system using an optimal hadronic polarimeter. This is achieved with the aid of jet substructure techniques and NN-inspired reconstruction methods, which improve the mapping between subjets and quarks. We find that entanglement can already be observed at more than the <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mn>5</a:mn><a:mi>σ</a:mi></a:math> level with existing data, and violation of Bell inequalities may be probed above the <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:mrow><c:mn>4</c:mn><c:mi>σ</c:mi></c:mrow></c:math> level at the HL-LHC with <e:math xmlns:e="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><e:mrow><e:mn>3</e:mn><e:mtext> </e:mtext><e:mtext> </e:mtext><e:msup><e:mrow><e:mi>ab</e:mi></e:mrow><e:mrow><e:mo>−</e:mo><e:mn>1</e:mn></e:mrow></e:msup></e:mrow></e:math> of data. Published by the American Physical Society 2024