If a photon carries too little power, it doesn’t match inside a proton (left). A photon with sufficiently excessive power is so small that it flies into the inside of a proton, the place it ‘sees’ a part of the proton (proper). Maximum entanglement then turns into seen between the ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ areas. Credit: IFJ PAN
Fragments of the inside of a proton have been proven by scientists from Mexico and Poland to exhibit most quantum entanglement. The discovery, already confronted with experimental information, permits us to suppose that in some respects the physics of the within of a proton could have a lot in widespread not solely with well-known thermodynamic phenomena, however even with the physics of… black holes.
Various fragments of the within of a proton have to be maximally entangled with one another, in any other case theoretical predictions wouldn’t agree with the info collected in experiments, it was proven in European Physical Journal C. The theoretical mannequin (which extends the unique proposal by physicists Dimitri Kharzeev and Eugene Levin) makes it attainable to suppose that, opposite to present perception, the physics working inside protons could also be associated to such ideas as entropy or temperature, which in flip could relate it to such unique objects as black holes. The authors of the invention are Dr. Martin Hentschinski from the Universidad de las Americas Puebla in Mexico and Dr. Krzysztof Kutak from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, Poland.
The Mexican-Polish theorists analyzed the scenario by which electrons are fired at protons. When an incoming electron carrying a unfavourable electrical cost approaches a positively charged proton, it interacts with it electromagnetically and deflects its path. Electromagnetic interplay implies that a photon has been exchanged between the electron and the proton. The stronger the interplay, the higher the change in momentum of the photon and due to this fact the shorter the related electromagnetic wave.
“If a photon is ‘short’ enough to ‘fits’ inside a proton, it begins to ‘resolve’ details of its internal structure. The result of interacting with this sort of photon can be the decay of the proton into particles. We have shown that there is entanglement between the two situations. If the observation by the photon of the interior part of the proton leads to its decay into a number of particles, let’s say three, then the number of particles originating from the unobserved part of the proton is determined by the number of particles seen in the observed part of the proton,” explains Dr. Kutak.
We can communicate of quantum entanglement of assorted quantum objects, if sure traits of the objects are associated to one another in a selected method. The classical analogy of the phenomenon will be represented by the toss of a coin. Let’s assume that one object is one aspect of the coin, and the opposite object is its different aspect. When we flip a coin, there is similar chance that the coin will land heads or tails dealing with up. If it lands heads up, we all know for positive that the opposite aspect is tails. We can then communicate of most entanglement for the reason that chance which determines the worth of an object’s attribute doesn’t favor any attainable worth: we have now a 50% likelihood of heads and the identical for tails. A smaller than most entanglement happens when the chance begins to favor one of many attainable outcomes to a higher or lesser extent.
“Our study shows that the interior of a proton seen by a passing photon must be entangled with the unseen part in just this maximal manner, as suggested by Kharzeev and Levin. In practice, this means that we have no chance of predicting whether, due to interaction with the photon, the proton will decay into three, four, or any other number of particles,” explains Dr. Hentschinski.
The new theoretical predictions have already been verified. If entanglement contained in the proton weren’t maximal, there can be discrepancies between theoretical calculations and the outcomes of the H1 experiment on the HERA accelerator on the DESY center in Hamburg, where positrons (i.e. antiparticles of the electrons) were collided with protons until 2007. Such discrepancies were not observed.
The success of the Polish-Mexican tandem is due to the fact that the researchers managed to correctly identify the factors responsible for the maximum entanglement of the proton interior.
In the naive schoolbook view, the proton is a system of three elementary particles: two up quarks and one down quark. However, the strong interactions between these quarks, carried by gluons, can be so strong that they lead to the creation of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs. These can be not only pairs of virtual gluons (which are their own antiparticles), but also pairs made up of any quark and its corresponding antiparticle (even one as massive as charm). All this means that inside the proton, apart from three valence quarks, there are constantly ‘boiling’ seas of virtual gluons and virtual quarks and antiquarks.
“In earlier publications, physicists dealing with the subject assumed that the source of entanglement should be a sea of gluons. Later, attempts were made to show that quarks and antiquarks are the dominant source of entanglement, but even here the proposed methods of description did not stand the test of time. Meanwhile, according to our model, verified by confrontation with experimental data, the sea of virtual gluons is responsible for about 80% of the entanglement, while the sea of virtual quarks and antiquarks is responsible for the remaining 20%,” emphasizes Dr. Kutak.
Most recently, quantum physicists have been associating entropy with the state inside a proton. This is a quantity well known from classical thermodynamics, where it is used to measure the degree of disordered motion of particles in an analyzed system. It is assumed that when a system is disordered, it has high entropy, whereas an ordered system has low entropy. It has recently been shown that in the case of the proton, we can successfully talk about entanglement entropy. However, many physicists have considered the proton to be a pure quantum state in which one should not speak of entropy at all. The consistency of the Mexican-Polish model with experiment is a strong argument for the fact that the concept of entanglement inside the proton as proposed by Kharzeev and Levin has a point. Last but not least, since entanglement entropy is also related to concepts such as the surface area of black holes, the latest result opens an interesting field for further research.
Reference: “Evidence for the maximally entangled low x proton in Deep Inelastic Scattering from H1 data” by Martin Hentschinski and Krzysztof Kutak, 4 February 2022, The European Physical Journal C.
DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10056-y
