Quantum tomography at the Electron-Ion Collider

Abstract

We initiate the study of quantum state tomography---the experimental reconstruction of the complete spin density matrix---of massless and massive quark-antiquark pairs produced at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). We show that all components of the spin density matrix can be accessed through azimuthal angular correlations between hadron and dihadron pairs generated by the Collins and dihadron fragmentation functions. This enables the experimental investigation of a variety of quantum information properties at the EIC, such as entanglement and Bell-nonlocality. We predict that the recently discovered maximal entanglement in the heavy-quark sector is signaled by a strong modification of the usual Collins angular dependence $\cos(\phi+\phi')$