Maximal Entanglement in High Energy Physics

Abstract

We analyze how maximal entanglement is generated at the fundamental level in QED by studying correlations between helicity states in tree-level scattering processes at high energy. We demonstrate that two mechanisms for the generation of maximal entanglement are at work: i)ss-channel processes where the virtual photon carries equal overlaps of the helicities of the final state particles, and ii) the indistinguishable superposition between tt- and uu-channels. We then study whether requiring maximal entanglement constrains the coupling structure of QED and the weak interactions. In the case of photon-electron interactions unconstrained by gauge symmetry, we show how this requirement allows to reproduce QED. For ZZ-mediated weak scattering, the maximal entanglement principle leads to non-trivial predictions for the value of the weak mixing angle \theta_WθW. Our results are a first step towards understanding the connections between maximal entanglement and the fundamental symmetries of high-energy physics.