https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-026-07988-9
Regular Article
Quantum entanglement and radiation effects at linear 
colliders
Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC), CSIC-Universitat de València, C/ Catedrático José Beltrán, 2, 46980, Paterna, Spain
a
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Received:
24
April
2026
Accepted:
19
June
2026
Published online:
6
July
2026
Abstract
Quantum entanglement, a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, plays a central role in areas such as cryptography, quantum computation, and information theory. Recent measurements by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have demonstrated entanglement in top–antitop quark pairs produced at the LHC, motivating further exploration of this phenomenon. This work investigates the entanglement properties of top–antitop systems at future 
colliders, highlighting two key findings: (i) Entanglement becomes significant at center-of-mass energies above 400 GeV, and (ii) its magnitude depends on the initial beam polarization, which can be tuned to enhance the quantum correlations by up to 9% between the 
and the 
case. We further analyze the impact of single final-state gluon radiation on entanglement, finding that high-energy emissions can substantially reduce it, potentially transforming an entangled state into a separable one. A complementary statistical analysis shows that this radiation-induced entanglement loss, interpreted as an experimentally accessible indicator of gluon-induced decoherence effects, could be observed with a significance exceeding 5 sigma at the expected LCF configurations, using hadronic polarimetry in leptonic+hadronic and fully hadronic channels. Consistent results are obtained for two robust quantum observables, establishing linear colliders as gateways to further investigate quantum entanglement and probe signatures of quantum decoherence in particle physics in the decades to come.
María Moreno and Marcel Vos have contributed equally to this work.
© The Author(s) 2026
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