Quantum Entanglement and Thermal Behavior in Charged-Current Weak Interactions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that quantum entanglement in nucleon interactions leads to thermal features in pion momentum distributions, extending observations from collider physics to electroweak interactions.

Contribution

It reveals a novel link between quantum entanglement and thermal behavior in weak interactions, previously observed only in high-energy collider experiments.

Findings

Entanglement causes thermal components in pion distributions.

Thermal component absent in coherent nuclear scattering.

First evidence of such phenomena in electroweak interactions.

Abstract

We show that quantum entanglement between causally separated regions of a nucleon in antineutrino-nucleon scattering manifests itself as a thermal component in the resulting pion momentum distribution. For antineutrino scattering coherently from the (carbon) nucleus as a whole, this thermal component is absent, as expected by our quantum entanglement thermalization proposition. These phenomena, which have been observed in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, and in electromagnetic deep inelastic scattering, are now for the first time shown to exist in electroweak interactions as well.