Quantum Entanglement and Thermal Behavior in Charged-Current Weak Interactions

Abstract

We show that quantum entanglement between causally separated regions of a nucleon in antineutrino-nucleon scattering manifests itself as a thermal component in the resulting pion momentum distribution. For antineutrino scattering coherently from the (carbon) nucleus as a whole, this thermal component is absent, as expected by our quantum entanglement thermalization proposition. These phenomena, which have been observed in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, and in electromagnetic deep inelastic scattering, are now for the first time shown to exist in electroweak interactions as well.