⚛️ Scientists Found Quantum Entanglement Inside Higgs Boson Decays
Einstein famously disliked quantum entanglement enough to call it “spooky action at a distance.”
Now physicists have found strong evidence that the same bizarre quantum connection survives inside some of the most violent particle collisions humans can create.
Using the ATLAS Experiment detector at the Large Hadron Collider, researchers studied Higgs bosons decaying into pairs of Z bosons — massive particles that exist for only a tiny fraction of a second.
The question was simple:
Are the quantum states of those two particles independent — or entangled?
The Z bosons disappear far too quickly to measure directly. Instead, researchers reconstructed their spin states from the directions of the electrons and muons produced when they decayed.
The resulting correlations strongly favored quantum entanglement. A statistical analysis rejected a separable, non-entangled description at 4.7 sigma — strong evidence, although just below particle physics’ conventional 5-sigma discovery threshold.
There is another unusual detail.
A Z boson has three possible spin projections. So instead of the familiar two-state qubits used in quantum computing, the entangled Z bosons behave mathematically as qutrits — three-state quantum systems.
Entanglement itself is not new. Scientists have demonstrated it spectacularly with photons, atoms and other systems.
What is new is where it survived.
These Z bosons were created in proton collisions at energies of 13 and 13.6 TeV. They are enormously heavier and vastly shorter-lived than the particles used in traditional entanglement experiments. The result provides the first measurements of entanglement between pairs of Z bosons and strong evidence for entanglement between massive vector bosons at the electroweak scale.
Quantum mechanics, in other words, does not become less weird when you turn the energy up.
It just gets a much bigger laboratory.
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https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/y1nh-1b82