Relativistic Effects in Spin Correlations Induced by QED Scattering and Wigner Rotations

Abstract

We study the relativistic nature of the interactions that, at tree level, generate spin correlations between two electrons in M\o ller scattering, as well as in an extended process involving a witness particle $C$. The corresponding processes, $e^{-}e^{-}\rightarrow e^{-}e^{-}$ and $e^{-}e^{-}C\rightarrow e^{-}e^{-}C$, are analyzed both in the center-of-mass frame and, for the former process, in a Lorentz-boosted frame where Wigner rotations arise. It is found that, through a nonrelativistic approximation of the scattering amplitudes, dipole-dipole and current-dipole interactions are responsible for the emergence of these correlations. This is evidenced by the variation of the von Neumann entropy of one electron for initially separable states, and of $C$ for an initially prepared three-particle entangled W-state. In Wigner rotations, the invariance of entropy under local unitary transformations is maintained at the expense of the emergence of quantum coherence in the density matrix at large rapidities. As a consequence, the final states of both particles are evaluated and shown to encode information about the scattering process through their spin expectation values. This framework is then used to comment on the correlations in the inelastic process $e^{-}e^{+}\rightarrow\mu^{-}\mu^{+}$, for which some research has reported differing results.