Entanglement Enabled Intensity Interferometry in ultrarelativistic ultraperipheral nuclear collisions

TL;DR

This paper introduces an entanglement-enabled intensity interferometry method as a novel tool to study the sub-femtoscale structure of matter in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, offering advantages over traditional HBT techniques.

Contribution

It proposes a new entanglement-based interferometry framework ($E^2 I^2$) for extracting nonperturbative QCD features from ultraperipheral collisions, including spatial distributions of color singlet configurations.

Findings

$E^2 I^2$ can determine spatial distributions of pomeron configurations.

Method can reveal spin structure of pomeron couplings.

Potential to discover rare odderon states.

Abstract

An important tool in studying the sub-femtoscale spacetime structure of matter in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions is Hanbury-Brown-Twiss (HBT) intensity interferometry of identical particles in the final state of such collisions. We show here that a variant of an entanglement enabled intensity interferometry ($E^2 I^2$) proposed by Cotler and Wilczek provides a powerful alternative to HBT interferometry in extracting fundamental nonperturbative features of QCD at high energies. In particular, we show that the spatial distributions of color singlet (pomeron) configurations in nuclei can be obtained from exclusive resonant decays of $\rho$-mesons into $\pi^\pm$-pairs in ultrarelativistic ultraperipheral nuclear collisions (UPCs) at RHIC and the LHC. The $E^2 I^2$ framework developed here is quite general. It can be employed to extract information on the spin structure of pomeron couplings as well as enhance the discovery potential for rare odderon configurations from exclusive vector meson decays into few-particle final states both in UPCs and at the Electron-Ion Collider.