When the Machine Chimes the Bell: Entanglement and Bell Inequalities with Boosted $t\bar{t}$

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider provides a unique opportunity to study quantum entanglement and violation of Bell inequalities at the highest energy available today. In this paper, we will investigate these quantum correlations with top quark pair production, which represents a system of two-qubits. The spacelike separation requirement for the two causally disconnected top quarks requires they fly relativistically away from each other, which motivates the use of the boosted top-tagging with the semi-leptonic top pair channel. Although measuring the spin polarization of the hadronic top quark is known to be challenging, our study indicates that it is feasible to reconstruct the spin density matrix of the two-qubit system using an optimal hadronic polarimeter. This is achieved with the aid of jet substructure techniques and NN-inspired reconstruction methods, which improve the mapping between subjets and quarks. We find that entanglement can already be observed at more than $5\sigma$ level with existing data, and violation of Bell inequalities may be probed above 4$\sigma$ level at the HL-LHC with 3 ab$^{-1}$ of data.