Entanglement and Bell Inequality Violation in <i>B</i> → <i>ϕϕ</i> Decays

Abstract

The decays of the B meson into vector mesons, observed during the LHCb experiment, provide an ideal laboratory to investigate particle physics phenomena with quantum information theory methods. In this article, we focus on the decays yielding a pair of ϕ mesons to investigate the presence of entanglement in the spin correlations of the system and quantify the amount of Bell inequality violation it entails. Our results show that the present LHCb data allow access to entanglement and to the Bell inequality violation with a significance exceeding the 5σ threshold in both the cases. This demonstrates that the strong and electroweak interactions responsible for the B meson decay act as a source of entanglement and the quantum mechanics nature of high-energy phenomena. Particular attention is paid to the assessment of loopholes: deficiencies in the experimental setup which could invalidate the results of the Bell test.

Keywords

• LHCb
• entanglement
• spin
• Bell inequality violation