arXiv subjects

R. Floreanini

Publications and source records attributed to R. Floreanini.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Measuring CP violation using quantum state tomography

We investigate direct CP violation in neutral meson decays by reconstructing the associated density matrices and measuring their difference using the trace distance. Our results cover neutral kaon decays into two scalar triplets of isospin space, specifically the pions, and decays of $B$- and $D$- mesons into two scalar octets of SU(3) flavor space. We briefly discuss the quantum properties of these states, including entanglement, contextuality, and nonlocality. Additionally, we demonstrate a comparable approach for spin-1 final states by employing a density matrix describing states in the space of helicities. The significance of CP violation obtained through this method is consistently comparable, and often surpasses that obtained using only single, or combinations of, asymmetries.

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arXiv2025

Quantum pions

We show that two- and three-pion states produced in the decay of neutral kaons are contextual, entangled, and Bell nonlocal in isospin space. By reinterpreting the experimental values of the different isospin amplitudes, we can determine the amount of entanglement enjoyed by these states and the extent to which they violate the non-contextuality and Bell locality inequalities. Notably, the three-pion state offers a genuine multipartite test of Bell nonlocality with qutrits.

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arXiv2025

Local vs. nonlocal entanglement in top-quark pairs at the LHC

We show that the entanglement observed in top-antitop quark spin states at the LHC is local in the energy region close to the production threshold. In contrast, nonlocal entanglement is observed in the central boosted region defined by a top-quark pair invariant mass $m_{t\bar t} > 800$ GeV and scattering angles $\Theta$ satisfying $|\cos \Theta |<0.2$. This makes top-quark pairs a unique laboratory for studying the interplay between entanglement and Bell locality. The locality of entanglement near the production threshold is further supported by a recent CMS analysis, which reports a significance of more than $5\sigma$. We also demonstrate that there exists a kinematic region where the spin states of the top-antitop quark are separable, yet they exhibit non-zero discord and magic.

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arXiv2025

Tests of quantum contextuality in particle physics

Quantum contextuality refers to the impossibility of assigning a predefined, intrinsic value to a physical property of a system independently of the context in which the property is measured. It is, perhaps, the most fundamental feature of quantum mechanics. The many states with different spin that particle physics provides are the ideal setting for testing contextuality. We verify that the polarization states of single spin-1 massive particles produced at colliders are contextual. We test $W^{+}$ gauge bosons produced in top-quark decays, $J/\psi$ and $K^{*}(892)^0$ mesons in $B$-meson decays and $\phi$ mesons in $\chi^0_c$ and $\chi^1_c$ charmonium decays by reinterpreting the data and the analyses of the ATLAS, LHCb, Belle II and BESIII experimental collaborations, respectively. The polarization states of these four particles show contextuality with a significance larger than $5\sigma$. We also discuss the presence of quantum contextuality in spin states of bipartite systems formed by spin-1/2 particles. We test $\Lambda$ and $\Sigma$ baryons reinterpreting two BESIII data analyses, and pairs of top quarks utilizing a recent analysis of the CMS collaboration. Quantum contextuality is present with a significance exceeding $5\sigma$ also in these cases. In addition, we study the feasibility of testing quantum contextuality by means of $Z$ boson production in association with the Higgs boson, $Z$ and $W$ bosons pairs created in Higgs boson decays and with pairs of $\tau$ leptons. For the latter, we use Monte Carlo simulations that mimic the settings of SuperKEKB and of future lepton colliders. Experiments at high energies, though not designed for the purpose, perform surprisingly well in testing for quantum contextuality.

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arXiv2025

About testing Bell locality at colliders

High-energy colliders enable the testing of quantum mechanics at its most fundamental level, in the presence of strong and electroweak interactions, with systems that consist of qubits (fermions) and qutrits (massive spin-1 bosons). Quantum state tomography at colliders enables the witnessing of entanglement and Bell non-locality, two defining characteristics of quantum mechanics. We offer a comprehensive explanation of the underlying principles and the methods employed to achieve this remarkable feat.

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arXiv2025

Quantum contextuality of spin-1 massive particles

Contextuality is a fundamental property of quantum mechanics. Contrary to entanglement, which can only exist in composite systems, contextuality is also present for single entities. The case of a three-level system is of particular interest because--in agreement with the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem--it is the simplest in which quantum contextuality is necessarily present. We verify that the polarizations of spin-1 massive particles produced at collider experiments indeed exhibit contextuality. To this purpose we consider $W$ gauge bosons produced in top-quark decays, $J/\psi$ and $K^{*}(892)^0$ mesons created in $B$-meson decays and $\phi$ mesons resulting from $\chi^0_c$ charmonium decays, making use of the data collected and analyzed by the ATLAS, LHCb and BESIII collaborations, respectively. The polarizations of all these four particles show contextuality with a significance of more than $5\sigma$.

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arXiv2025

Cluster property and Bell's inequalities

Among the many loopholes that might be invoked to reconcile local realism with the experimental violations of Bell's inequalities, the space-dependence of the correlation functions appears particularly relevant for its connections with the so-called cluster property, one of the basic ingredient of axiomatic quantum field theory. The property states that the expectation values of products of observables supported within space-like separated space-time regions factorize. Actually, in some massive models the factorization is exponentially fast with respect to the distance between the systems possibly involved in actual experiments. It is then often argued that considering the space dependence of the quantities involved in the Bell's like inequalities would eventually not violate them and thus support the reproducibility of the quantum behaviour by a suitable local hidden variable model. In this note, we show when this is actually the case and how non-local effects can still be visible.

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arXiv2024

Bell inequality is violated in charmonium decays

The experimental data on the helicity amplitudes of charmonium decays allow us to measure entanglement in final state spin correlations and test possible violations of the Bell inequality. We find that the Bell inequality is violated with a significance of 5$\sigma$ or more in the decays $\eta_{c}, \, \chi_{c}^{0}, \, J/\psi \to \Lambda +\bar \Lambda$ $J/\psi \to \Xi^- +\bar \Xi^+,\; \Xi^0 +\bar \Xi^0, \;\Sigma^{-} +\bar \Sigma^{+},\; \Sigma^{0} +\bar \Sigma^{0}$, $\psi(3686) \to \Xi^- +\bar \Xi^+,\; \Sigma^- +\bar \Sigma^+,\; \Sigma^{0} +\bar \Sigma^{0}$, $\chi^{0}_{c}, \, \chi_{c}^{1} \to \phi+ \phi$ . The decays $\psi(3686) \to \Lambda +\bar \Lambda$ and $\Xi^0 +\bar \Xi^0$ show the same violation but with less significance. The decay $\psi(3686) \to \Omega^- + \bar \Omega^+$ displays entanglement. These results firmly establish the presence of entanglement and quantum non-separability at high energies, in a setting with particles of different spins and interacting through electroweak and strong interactions. In addition, the relatively long lifetime of some of the strange baryons produced in the decays provides a natural probe to test whether quantum spin correlations remain after the particles have interacted with the beam pipe and the first few layers of the detector.

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arXiv2023

Bell inequality is violated in $B^0\to J/\psi \, K^{\star}(892)^0$ decays

The violation of the Bell inequality is one of the hallmarks of quantum mechanics and can be used to rule out local deterministic alternative descriptions. We utilize the data analysis published by the LHCb collaboration on the helicity amplitudes for the decay $B^0\to J/\psi \,K^*(892)^0$ to compute the entanglement among the polarizations of the final vector mesons and the violation of the Bell inequality that it entails. We find that quantum entanglement can be detected with a significance well above 5$\sigma$ (nominally 84$\sigma$) and Bell inequality is violated with a significance well above 5$\sigma$ (nominally 36$\sigma$) -- thereby firmly establishing these distinguishing feature of quantum mechanics at high energies in a collider setting and in the presence of strong and weak interactions. Entanglement is also present and the Bell inequality is violated in other decays of the $B$ mesons into vector mesons, but with lesser significance.

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arXiv2023

A quantum fluctuation description of charge qubits

We consider a specific instance of a superconducting circuit, the so-called charge-qubit, consisting of a capacitor and a Josephson junction. Starting from the microscopic description of the latter in terms of two tunneling BCS models in the strong-coupling quasi-spin formulation, we derive the Hamiltonian governing the quantum behavior of the circuit in the limit of a large number $N$ of quasi-spins. Our approach relies on the identification of suitable quantum fluctuations, i.e. of collective quasi-spin operators, which account for the presence of fluctuation operators in the superconducting phase that retain a quantum character in spite of the large-$N$ limit. We show indeed that these collective quantum fluctuations generate the Heisenberg algebra on the circle and that their dynamics reproduces the one of the quantized charge-qubit, without the need of a phenomenological ``third quantization'' of a semiclassically inspired model. As a byproduct of our derivation, we explicitly obtain the temperature dependence of the junction critical Josephson current in the strong coupling regime, a result which is not directly accessible using standard approximation techniques.

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arXiv2023

Stringent bounds on $HWW$ and $HZZ$ anomalous couplings with quantum tomography at the LHC

Quantum tomography provides the full reconstruction of the density matrix of a state. We use it to study the Higgs boson decay into weak gauge bosons. Anomalous couplings beyond the Standard Model can be constrained by means of observables easily defined in terms of the polarization density matrix. We describe a strategy based on three observables that together provide the most stringent limits. Two of these observables are linked to the entanglement between the polarizations of the two gauge bosons, the other is based on CP-odd combinations of one momentum and two polarizations. We find for the $Z$ channel that this strategy offers, already with the available LHC data, limits competitive with the best available bounds. We argue that the inclusion of these observables in routine experimental analyses can lead to more stringent global fit limits.

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arXiv2023

Bell inequalities and quantum entanglement in weak gauge bosons production at the LHC and future colliders

Quantum entanglement of weak interaction gauge bosons produced at colliders can be explored by computing the corresponding polarization density matrix. To this end, we consider the Higgs boson decays $H\to W W^*$ and $H\to Z Z^*$, in which $W^*$ and $Z^*$ are off-shell states, and the $WW$, $WZ$ and $ZZ$ di-boson production in proton collisions. The polarization density matrix of the di-boson state is determined by the amplitude of the production process and can be experimentally reconstructed from the angular distribution of the momenta of the final states into which the gauge bosons decay. We show that a suitable instance of the Bell inequality is violated in $H\to Z Z^*$ to a degree that can be tested at the LHC with future data. The same Bell inequality is violated in the production of $WW$ and $ZZ$ boson pairs for invariant masses above 900 GeV and scattering angles close to $\pi/2$ in the center of mass frame. LHC data in this case are not sufficient to establish the violation of the Bell inequality. We also analyze the prospects for detecting Bell inequality violations in di-boson final states at future $e^+e^-$ and muon colliders. A further observable that provides a lower bound on the amount of polarization entanglement in the di-boson system is computed for each of the examined processes. The analytic expressions for the polarization density matrices are presented in full in an Appendix. We also provide the unitary matrices required in the optimization procedure necessary in testing the Bell inequalities.

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arXiv2022

Local generation of entanglement with Redfield dynamics

In phenomenological applications, time evolutions of Bloch-Redfield type are widely adopted for modelling open system dynamics, despite their non-positive preserving character: this physical inconsistency, that in general shows up at small times, is usually cured by suitably restricting the space of allowed initial states. Nevertheless, additional problems may arise in relation to entanglement: specifically, we show that Redfield dynamics can generate entanglement through a purely local action, and this unphysical effect can persist for finite times.

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arXiv2021

Testing Bell inequalities at the LHC with top-quark pairs

Entanglement between the spins of top-quark pairs produced at a collider can be used to test a (generalized) Bell inequality at energies never explored so far. We show how the measurement of a single observable can provide a test of the violation of the Bell inequality at the 98% CL with the data already collected at the Large Hadron Collider and at the 99.99% CL with the higher luminosity of the next run.

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arXiv2020

Entanglement in indistinguishable particle systems

For systems consisting of distinguishable particles, there exists an agreed upon notion of entanglement which is fundamentally based on the possibility of addressing individually each one of the constituent parties. Instead, the indistinguishability of identical particles hinders their individual addressability and has prompted diverse, sometimes discordant definitions of entanglement. In the present review, we provide a comparative analysis of the relevant existing approaches, which is based on the characterization of bipartite entanglement in terms of the behaviour of correlation functions. Such a a point of view provides a fairly general setting where to discuss the presence of non-local effects; it is performed in the light of the following general consistency criteria: i) entanglement corresponds to non-local correlations and cannot be generated by local operations; ii) when, by "freezing" suitable degrees of freedom, identical particles can be effectively distinguished, their entanglement must reduce to the one that holds for distinguishable particles; iii) in absence of other quantum resources, only entanglement can outperform classical information protocols. These three requests provide a setting that allows to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of the existing approaches to indistinguishable particle entanglement and to contribute to the current understanding of such a crucial issue. Indeed, they can be classified into five different classes: four hinging on the notion of particle and one based on that of physical modes. We show that only the latter approach is consistent with all three criteria, each of the others indeed violating at least one of them.

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arXiv2018

Quantum detailed balance conditions and fluctuation relations for thermalizing quantum dynamics

Quantum detailed balance conditions and quantum fluctuation relations are two important concepts in the dynamics of open quantum systems: both concern how such systems behave when they thermalize because of interaction with an environment. We prove that for thermalizing quantum dynamics the quantum detailed balance conditions yield the validity of a quantum fluctuation relation (where only forward-time dynamics is considered). This implies that to have such a quantum fluctuation relation (which in turn enables a precise formulation of the second law of thermodynamics for quantum systems) it suffices to fulfill the quantum detailed balance conditions. We, however, show that the converse is not necessarily true; indeed, there are cases of thermalizing dynamics which feature the quantum fluctuation relation without satisfying detailed balance. We illustrate our results with three examples.

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arXiv2017

Noisy effects in interferometric quantum gravity tests

Quantum-enhanced metrology is boosting interferometer sensitivities to extraordinary levels, up to the point where table-top experiments have been proposed to measure Planck-scale effects predicted by quantum gravity theories. In setups involving multiple photon interferometers, as those for measuring the so-called holographic fluctuations, entanglement provides substantial improvements in sensitivity. Entanglement is however a fragile resource and may be endangered by decoherence phenomena. We analyze how noisy effects arising either from the weak coupling to an external environment or from the modification of the canonical commutation relations in photon propagation may affect this entanglement enhanced gain in sensitivity.

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arXiv2017

Bound on dissipative effects from semileptonic neutral B-meson decays

The semileptonic decay asymmetry $\mathcal{A}_{Δm}$ is studied within the open quantum systems approach to the physics of the neutral meson $B^0$-$\overline{B^0}$ system: this extended treatment takes into account possible non-standard, dissipative effects induced by the presence of an external environment. A bound on these effects is provided through the analysis of available experimental data from the Belle Collaboration.

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