Quantum probes of invisible particles in top-quark pair production at the LHC

Abstract

Top-quark pair production at the LHC provides a bipartite spin system whose correlations are imprinted in the angular distributions of the decay products and can be studied with quantum-information tools. We investigate whether this spin structure can be used to probe invisible new physics in $pp\to t\bar t+X$, where $X$ is a spin-0 or spin-1 mediator motivated by top-philic simplified dark-matter models. Focusing on the dileptonic channel at the High-Luminosity LHC, we compare the sensitivity of the inclusive event yield, the visible invariant-mass distribution, an event-level estimator of the entanglement marker $D$, and the fiducial spin correlation $\mathcal{D}$ measured as a function of the visible invariant mass. We find that observables retaining spin information improve the expected exclusion sensitivity with respect to rate and kinematic information alone, with $\mathcal{D}(M_{t\bar t}^{\rm vis})$ providing the strongest reach for both mediator spins. The same observables also enhance the discrimination between scalar and pseudoscalar couplings of the spin-zero mediator, with $\mathcal{D}(M_{t\bar t}^{\rm vis})$ again providing the strongest sensitivity, particularly at larger mediator masses. These results show that quantum-information-motivated observables of the $t\bar t$ system can be efficient tools to probe both the presence of invisible new physics and the structure of its couplings to top quarks.