Measurements of -Boson Pair Entanglement in Decays of Higgs Bosons at the ATLAS Experiment
G. Aad (CPPM, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS/IN2P3, Marseille, France)
; E. Aakvaag (Department for Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway)
; B. Abbott (Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA)
; S. Abdelhameed (New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
; K. Abeling (II. Physikalisches Institut, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany)
; et al - Show all 2862 authors
Entanglement is a key property of quantum systems. In this Letter the first measurements of quantum entanglement between spins in pairs of bosons are reported, using proton-proton collision data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at center-of-mass energies of 13 and 13.6 TeV, recorded with the ATLAS detector. Measurements of angular observables sensitive to spin-density-matrix elements in the process yield coefficients and , consistent with their Standard Model predictions. A complementary hypothesis test using the full angular distribution, and relying on several Standard Model assumptions in the decays, provides substantially higher sensitivity to quantum correlations and disfavors the separable-state hypothesis at a significance of 4.7 standard deviations (expected ) relative to the entangled Standard Model hypothesis. These results provide strong evidence of quantum entanglement between massive bosons (spin qutrits) at the electroweak scale.