Maximally entangled gluons for any $x$

Abstract

Individual quarks and gluons at small-$x$ inside an unpolarized hadron can be regarded as Bell states in which qubits in the spin and orbital angular momentum spaces are maximally entangled. Using the machinery of quantum information science, we generalize this observation to all values $0<x<1$ and describe gluons (but not quarks) as maximally entangled states between a qubit and a qudit. We introduce the conditional probability distribution $P(l^z|s^z)$ of a gluon's orbital angular momentum $l^z$ given its helicity $s^z$. Restricting to the three states $l^z=0,\pm 1$, which constitute a qutrit, we explicitly compute $P$ as a function of $x$