Quantum Entanglement in Bosons
CERN Physicists Detect Groundbreaking Quantum Entanglement Between Decaying Higgs Bosons
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Physicists with CERN’s ATLAS experiment have found strong evidence of quantum entanglement between two Z bosons produced when a Higgs boson decays at the Large Hadron Collider. By analyzing the rare H → ZZ* → 4ℓ process, in which the Z bosons decay into electrons or muons, researchers determined that their spin states are so closely correlated that the particles cannot be described independently. The result is especially significant because Z bosons have three possible spin states, making them qutrits rather than the two-state qubits represented by particles such as top quarks. ATLAS previously observed entanglement between top-quark pairs in 2024, but researchers said the Z-boson entanglement is substantially stronger and represents the first entanglement measurement involving elementary-particle qutrits.
Key Points
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The analysis combined ATLAS data from the LHC’s second run at 13 TeV with three years of Run 3 proton-proton collisions collected from 2022 to 2024 at 13.6 TeV. Its broader objective was to measure the Higgs-boson production rate and test it against Standard Model predictions.
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The H → ZZ* → 4ℓ channel accounts for only about 3% of Higgs decays, but it is particularly well suited to precision measurements because ATLAS detects electrons and muons efficiently and faces relatively little background. The channel was also one of the key signatures used in the 2012 Higgs-boson discovery.
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The result was reported in a paper published in Physical Review Letters on September 11, marking the first direct evidence of entanglement between elementary-particle qutrits.
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Entanglement experiments were historically conducted at lower energies with systems such as atoms and photons; the ATLAS measurement extends these investigations into the high-energy regime of the LHC and could be relevant to broader research on quantum computing and quantum communications.
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