Entanglement as a probe of hadronization

Abstract

Recently, it was discovered that the proton structure at high energies exhibits maximal entanglement. This leads to a simple relation between the proton's parton distributions and the entropy of hadrons produced in high-energy inelastic interactions that has been experimentally confirmed. In this letter, we extend this approach to the production of jets. Here, the maximal entanglement predicts a relation between the jet fragmentation function and the entropy of hadrons produced in jet fragmentation. We test this relation using the ATLAS Collaboration data on jet production at the Large Hadron Collider and find good agreement between the prediction based on maximal entanglement within the jet and the data. This study represents the first use of the quantum entanglement framework in the experimental study of the hadronization process, offering a new perspective on the transition from perturbative to non-perturbative QCD. Our results open the door to a more comprehensive understanding of the quantum nature of hadronization.

8 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (6)

• The Color Glass Condensate density matrix: Lindblad evolution, entanglement entropy and Wigner functional
• Dynamical entropy of dense QCD states
• Investigating entanglement entropy at small-x in DIS off protons and nuclei
• Quark and gluon entanglement in the proton on the light cone at intermediate $x$
• Investigating the QCD dynamical entropy in high-energy hadronic collisions
• Entropy for $SU(3{)}_c$ Quark States

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Spin correlations and Bell nonlocality in $\Lambda \bar{\Lambda }$ pair production from $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collisions with a thrust cut
• Entanglement Negativity of Spin-Orbit Correlations in a general Qubit-Qudit Setup
• Thermal nature of confining strings
• Quantum entanglement between partons in a strongly coupled quantum field theory
• Small $x$ behavior in QCD from maximal entanglement and conformal invariance
• Entanglement, Trace Anomaly and Confinement in QCD