A General Analysis for Observing Quantum Interference at Colliders

TL;DR

This paper develops a general framework to detect quantum interference in collider experiments by analyzing the quantum states and introduces statistical measures to quantify interference, with applications to particle physics.

Contribution

It presents a novel formalism for observing quantum interference in collider data, bridging quantum mechanics and high-energy physics analysis.

Findings

Introduces statistical measures for quantum interference detection.

Provides explicit examples demonstrating the formalism.

Bridges quantum mechanics concepts with collider experiment analysis.

Abstract

Despite their inextricable quantum mechanical nature, events at a high energy particle collider experiment typically have very few unambiguous quantum signatures, due the type of data and the manner in which they are collected. We present a general analysis of one feature of quantum mechanics, interference between two orthogonal states on Hilbert space, projected onto the basis of states that span a collider experiment observable space. Identification of quantum interference can be considered as a binary discrimination between a pure state and a mixed state, and we introduce several statistical measures that quantify the amplitude of interference in a pure state with respect to a mixed state that exhibits no interference. Two explicit examples from particle physics are provided to demonstrate features of the general formalism.