Observation of quantum entanglement with top quarks at the ATLAS detector
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Fecha
0024-09
Profesor/a Guía
Facultad/escuela
Idioma
en
Título de la revista
ISSN de la revista
Título del volumen
Editor
Nature Research
Nombre de Curso
Licencia CC
CC BY LICENSE
Licencia CC
Resumen
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<mtt¯<380GeV. 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. © The Author(s) 2024.
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Palabras clave
Article; astronomy; cryptography; hadron; large hadron collider; luminance; metrology; polarization; quantum computation; quantum entanglement; quantum information; quantum mechanics; elementary particle; quantum theory
Citación
DOI
10.1038/s41586-024-07824-z