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Quantumness of top quark pairs produced at LHC within SMEFT framework

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-05-13 v1

Abstract

Top and anti-top quark pair production at LHC provides a unique setting to probe non-classical correlations at the TeV scale. We study quantum information (QI) properties of the ttˉt\bar{t} spin state in pppp collisions at s=13\sqrt{s}=13 TeV within the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), focusing on dimension-6 operators that induce anomalous chromo- and weak dipole moments of the top quark within their current experimental bounds. The ttˉt\bar{t} spin density matrix is reconstructed from the joint angular distribution of the final state charged leptons in the kk-rr-nn helicity basis. We analyze three complementary QI quantities: concurrence-based quantum entanglement (QE), geometric quantum discord (GQD), and the Bell parameter,across four ttˉt\bar{t} invariant-mass bins. Within the Standard Model (SM), non-vanishing QE appears only near threshold (mttˉ400m_{t\bar{t}}\lesssim 400 GeV), while GQD remains nonzero across the full phase space, indicating persistent non-classical correlations even for separable states. Anomalous chromo-dipole interactions modify these observables primarily near threshold: μ^t\hat{\mu}_t induces asymmetric shifts, whereas d^t\hat{d}_t produces a mild symmetric response without Bell inequality violation. Among weak dipole operators, the CP-even coupling C2VC_2^V generates the largest deformation of the QI observables, while ΔC1A,V\Delta C_1^{A,V} leave them unchanged. These results demonstrate that QI observables derived from the ttˉt\bar{t} spin density matrix provide a complementary probe of anomalous top-quark interactions with distinct sensitivity to CP-even and CP-odd operator structures.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.12033,
  title  = {Quantumness of top quark pairs produced at LHC within SMEFT framework},
  author = {Amir Subba and Yu Shi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.12033},
  year   = {2026}
}

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30 pages