Weak Interaction Processes: Which Quantum Information is revealed?

Abstract

We analyze the achievable limits of the quantum information processing of the weak interaction revealed by hyperons with spin. We find that the weak decay process corresponds to an interferometric device with a fixed visibility and fixed phase difference for each hyperon. Nature chooses rather low visibilities expressing a preference to parity conserving or violating processes (except for the decay ${\Sigma }^{+}⟶p{\pi }^0$). The decay process can be considered as an open quantum channel that carries the information of the hyperon spin to the angular distribution of the momentum of the daughter particles. We find a simple geometrical information theoretic interpretation of this process: two quantization axes are chosen spontaneously with probabilities $\frac{1\pm \alpha }{2}$ where $\alpha$ is proportional to the visibility times the real part of the phase shift. Differently stated the weak interaction process corresponds to spin measurements with an imperfect Stern-Gerlach apparatus. Equipped with this information theoretic insight we show how entanglement can be measured in these systems and why Bell's nonlocality (in contradiction to common misconception in literature) cannot be revealed in hyperon decays. We study also under which circumstances contextuality can be revealed.

7 pages, 3 figures, version 2: title changed, minor revision

References in corpus (6)

• Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Bloch vectors for qudits
• The state space for two qutrits has a phase space structure in its core
• The geometry of bipartite qutrits including bound entanglement
• A Priori Which-Way Information in Quantum Interference with Unstable Particles
• Recent advances in contextuality tests

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Polarization and Entanglement in Baryon-Antibaryon Pair Production in Electron-Positron Annihilation
• A quantum information theoretic analysis of three flavor neutrino oscillations
• Maximal Entanglement in High Energy Physics
• Witnessing Entanglement In Compton Scattering Processes Via Mutually Unbiased Bases
• Nonlocal Correlation of Spin in High Energy Physics
• Entangled baryons: violation of Inequalities based on local realism assuming dependence of decays on hidden variables
• Test of Nonlocal Hidden Variable Theory by Leggett Inequality in High Energy Physics
• Entanglement of self interacting scalar fields in an expanding spacetime
• Test of local realism via entangled $\Lambda \bar{\Lambda }$ system
• Novel method to extract the femtometer structure of strange baryons using the vacuum polarization effect
• Class of Bell-Clauser-Horne inequalities for testing quantum nonlocality
• Contextuality and Nonlocality in Decaying Multipartite Systems
• Standard Model of Particle Physics Violating Crypto-Nonlocal Realism