Quantum Entanglement and Bell Inequality Violation in Semi-Leptonic Top Decays

Abstract

Quantum entanglement is a fundamental property of quantum mechanics. Recently, studies have explored entanglement in the $t\bar{t}$ system at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when both the top quark and anti-top quark decay leptonically. Entanglement is detected via correlations between the polarizations of the top and anti-top and these polarizations are measured through the angles of the decay products of the top and anti-top. In this work, we propose searching for evidence of quantum entanglement in the semi-leptonic decay channel where the final state includes one lepton, one neutrino, two $b$-flavor tagged jets, and two light jets from the $W$ decay. We find that this channel is both easier to reconstruct and has a larger effective quantity of data than the fully leptonic channel. As a result, the semi-leptonic channel is $60\%$ more sensitive to quantum entanglement and a factor of 3 more sensitive to Bell inequality violation, compared to the leptonic channel. In $139~{\rm fb}^{-1}$ ($3~{\rm ab}^{-1}$) of data at the LHC (HL-LHC), it should be feasible to measure entanglement at a precision of $\lesssim 3\%\ (0.7\%)$. Detecting Bell inequality violation, on the other hand, is more challenging. With $300~{\rm fb}^{-1}$ ($3~{\rm ab}^{-1}$) of integrated luminosity at the LHC Run-3 (HL-LHC), we expect a sensitivity of $1.3\sigma$ ($4.1 \sigma$). In our study, we utilize a realistic parametric fitting procedure to optimally recover the true angular distributions from detector effects. Compared to unfolding this procedure yields more stable results.