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arXiv · 2507.15947

A critical appraisal of tests of locality and of entanglement versus non-entanglement at colliders

Philip Bechtle·Cedric Breuning·Herbi K. Dreiner·Claude Duhr
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Abstract

It has been argued more than 30 years ago that it is not possible to test locality at colliders, due to the inability to directly measure non-commutating observables such as spin components in current collider experiments. Recently, there has been a lot of phenomenological and experimental activity around testing locality via Bell-type experiments or entanglement versus non-entanglement in a collider environment. These results seem to evade the earlier no-go theorem by indirectly measuring spin correlations via their relation to angular correlations between momenta. We perform a careful study of the feasibility of such an approach. We scrutinize the relationship between spin and angular correlations in both quantum mechanics and local hidden variable theories. Our conclusion is that it is currently not possible to perform a logically coherent set of experimental measurements at colliders that would allow one to test locality or entanglement versus non-entanglement. This reaffirms the earlier no-go theorem. We stress that the no-go theorem does not apply to measurements of observables inspired from entanglement and Quantum Information Theory to test the Standard Model of particle physics.

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Philip Bechtle, Cedric Breuning, Herbi K. Dreiner, Claude Duhr. 2025-07-21. A critical appraisal of tests of locality and of entanglement versus non-entanglement at colliders. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15947

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