[Submitted on 13 May 2024] (cross-list from hep-th)
An Area Law for Entanglement Entropy in Particle Scattering
Ian Low🇺🇸 · Zhewei Yin🇺🇸
The scattering cross section is the effective area of collision when two particles collide. Quantum mechanically, it is a measure of the probability for a specific process to take place. Employing wave packets to describe the scattering process, we compute the entanglement entropy in 2-to-2 scattering of particles in a general setting using the -matrix formalism. Applying the optical theorem, we show that the linear entropy is given by the elastic cross section in unit of the transverse size of the wave packet, , when the initial states are not entangled. The result allows for dual interpretations of the entanglement entropy as an area and as a probability. Since is generally believed, and observed experimentally, to grow with the collision energy in the high energy regime, the result suggests a "second law" of entanglement entropy for high energy collisions. Furthermore, the Froissart bound places an upper limit on the entropy growth.
- Comments:
- 5 pages + Supplementary Material, 1 figure
- Subjects:
- High Energy Physics — Theory (hep-th); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech); High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
- arXiv:
- 2405.08056 [pdf]