Abstract

We report the highest-energy observation of entanglement, in top−antitop quark events produced at the Large Hadron Collider, using a proton−proton collision data set with a center-of-mass energy of s√=13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 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, where 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 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=−0.547±0.002 (stat.)±0.021 (syst.) for 340<mtt¯<380 GeV. The observed result is more than five standard deviations from a scenario without entanglement and hence constitutes both the first observation of entanglement in a pair of quarks and the highest-energy observation of entanglement to date

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