Searching quantum entanglement in the <i>pp</i> → <i>ZZ</i> process*

Abstract Recent studies have shown that observing entangled particle states at a particle collider, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and testing the violation of Bell inequality in them can open up new research areas for studying high energy physics. We examine the presence of quantum entanglement in the process at leading order. We apply a generally recognized method, quantum state tomography, to reconstruct the spin density matrix of the joint ZZ system, through which all the relevant observables can be obtained. The angular distribution of the final leptons is obtained from simulated events using a Monte-Carlo program, which is used to reconstruct the spin density matrix. A non-zero value of the lower bound of the concurrence is measured with the simulated data. The numerical analysis shows that, with the luminosity corresponding to LHC Run 2+3, entanglement can be probed at the 2 level and up to the 3.75 level for High-Luminosity LHC data (3ab -1 ), revealing the possibility of finding quantum entanglement in real collider experiments.