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Apr 13 – 16, 2021
US/Eastern timezone

Maximal Entanglement in High Energy Physics

Apr 15, 2021, 2:50 PM
20m

Speaker

Alba Cervera Lierta (University of Toronto)

Description

We analyze how maximal entanglement is generated at the fundamental level in QED by studying correlations between helicity states in tree-level scattering processes at high energy. We demonstrate that two mechanisms for the generation of maximal entanglement are at work: i) s-channel processes where the virtual photon carries equal overlaps of the helicities of the final state particles, and ii) the indistinguishable superposition between t- and u-channels. We then study whether requiring maximal entanglement constrains the coupling structure of QED and the weak interactions. In the case of photon-electron interactions unconstrained by gauge symmetry, we show how this requirement allows reproducing QED. For Z-mediated weak scattering, the maximal entanglement principle leads to non-trivial predictions for the value of the weak mixing angle θW. Our results are a first step towards understanding the connections between maximal entanglement and the fundamental symmetries of high-energy physics.

Primary author

Alba Cervera Lierta (University of Toronto)

Presentation materials