Quantum Entanglement in Z Bosons express
Two particles flying apart in opposite directions behave as a single whole: measuring one instantly determines the state of the other. Such quantum entanglement has long been known for light particles, but now it has been observed for the first time in heavy Z bosons — the carriers of the weak force.
In the experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, protons collided to produce Higgs bosons, which quickly decayed into two Z bosons, which in turn decayed into pairs of electrons or muons. The ATLAS detector recorded the emission angles of these leptons, from which the spin states of the Z bosons were reconstructed. It turned out that the spins of the particles are correlated more strongly than any classical model without entanglement allows.
The result agrees with the predictions of the Standard Model and rules out the hypothesis of independent (separable) states at the level of 4.7 standard deviations. This opens the way to studying quantum correlations in the world of massive particles and testing the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics at new energy scales.
The spin of a Z boson can take three values (0, +1, -1), so it is called a qutrit — a quantum system with three states, unlike a qubit with two.
In the TV series "Dark Matter," entanglement is used for instantaneous communication between ships, echoing the idea of nonlocal correlations, although in reality information transfer is impossible.