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Editors’ picks 2023

Entanglement between a pair of top quarks

Nature Reviews Physics volume 6, page 85 (2024)Cite this article

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Entanglement is a purely quantum phenomenon that has been studied extensively in low-energy systems to explore the foundations of quantum mechanics and for applications in quantum technologies. Would entanglement manifest at very high energies, in a relativistic regime with exotic interactions and symmetries? There is no reason to suspect that it wouldn’t, but so far there has not been any experiment able to test this assumption. Now, the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has used data from 13 TeV proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to observe for the first time entanglement between a pair of top quarks. This is the highest-energy measurement of entanglement to date and could open a new experimental program of investigating quantum mechanics and quantum information in a completely unexplored regime.

This study is not only interesting for observing entanglement at such high energies, but also for using data that had not originally been collected for this purpose. The success of this analysis suggests further studies of these top–antitop quark quantum states, for example by measuring quantum discord which quantifies the ‘quantumness’ of correlations. If there are any measurable deviations from low-energy quantum entanglement these might hint at new physics beyond the standard model.

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References

Original article

  • ATLAS Collaboration. Observation of quantum entanglement in top-quark pair production using pp collisions of √s = 13TeV with the ATLAS detector. ATLAS-CONF-2023-069 (2023)

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  • Afik, Y. & de Nova, J. R. M. Quantum discord and steering in top quarks at the LHC. Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 221801 (2023)

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  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Iulia Georgescu

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  1. Iulia Georgescu
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Correspondence to Iulia Georgescu.

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Georgescu, I. Entanglement between a pair of top quarks. Nat Rev Phys 6, 85 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00695-3

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