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Balazs Konya

Researcher, IT administrator

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Observation of quantum entanglement with top quarks at the ATLAS detector

Author

  • G. Aad
  • T.P.A. Åkesson
  • C. Doglioni
  • P.A. Ekman
  • V. Hedberg
  • H. Herde
  • B. Konya
  • E. Lytken
  • R. Poettgen
  • N.D. Simpson
  • O. Smirnova
  • L. Zwalinski
Show all

Summary, in English

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

Department/s

  • Particle and nuclear physics
  • eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration
  • Department of Physics

Publishing year

2024

Language

English

Pages

542-547

Publication/Series

Nature

Volume

633

Issue

8030

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Topic

  • Subatomic Physics

Keywords

  • Elementary Particles
  • Protons
  • Quantum Theory
  • proton
  • collision
  • data set
  • energy management
  • experimental study
  • Monte Carlo analysis
  • quantum mechanics
  • scale effect
  • Article
  • astronomy
  • cryptography
  • hadron
  • large hadron collider
  • luminance
  • metrology
  • polarization
  • quantum computation
  • quantum entanglement
  • quantum information
  • elementary particle
  • quantum theory

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0028-0836