PRL Editor's Choice: Entanglement as a Probe of Hadronization
A recent publication in Physical Review Letters, by scientists at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Lab, was selected as an Editor's Choice. The work was done by Research Scientist Jaydeep Datta, Distinguished Professors Abhay Deshpande and Dimitri Kharzeev, Post Doctoral Fellow Charles Joseph Naïm, and Adjunct Associate Professor Zhoudunming Tu.
Previous work had discovered that the proton structure at high energies exhibits maximal entanglement, leading to a simple relation between the proton’s parton distributions and the entropy of hadrons produced in high-energy inelastic interactions, which has been experimentally confirmed.
In this work, the authors extended this approach to the production of jets, where the maximal entanglement predicts a relation between the jet fragmentation function and the entropy of hadrons produced in jet fragmentation. This relation was tested using the ATLAS Collaboration data on jet production at the Large Hadron Collider, and there was good agreement between the prediction based on maximal entanglement within the jet and the data.
This study represents the first use of a quantum entanglement framework in an experimental study of the hadronization process, offering a new perspective on the transition from perturbative to nonperturbative QCD. These results open the door to a more comprehensive understanding of the quantum nature of hadronization.