Measuring spin correlation between quarks during QCD confinement.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 41639574.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41586-025-09920-0 and PMC identifier 12872435.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC-ND.
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Abstract
The vacuum is now understood to have a rich and complex structure, characterized by fluctuating energy fields<sup>1</sup> and a condensate of virtual quark-antiquark pairs. The spontaneous breaking of the approximate chiral symmetry<sup>2</sup>, signalled by the nonvanishing quark condensate <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mo>⟨</mo> <mi>q</mi> <mover><mrow><mi>q</mi></mrow> <mo>¯</mo></mover> <mo>⟩</mo></mrow> </math> , is dynamically generated through topologically nontrivial gauge configurations such as instantons<sup>3</sup>. The precise mechanism linking the chiral symmetry breaking to the mass generation associated with quark confinement<sup>4</sup> remains a profound open question in quantum chromodynamics (QCD)-the fundamental theory of strong interaction. High-energy proton-proton collisions could liberate virtual quark-antiquark pairs from the vacuum that subsequently undergo confinement to form hadrons, whose properties could serve as probes into QCD confinement and the quark condensate. Here we report evidence of spin correlations in <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mi>Λ</mi> <mover><mrow><mi>Λ</mi></mrow> <mo>¯</mo></mover> </mrow> </math> hyperon pairs inherited from spin-correlated strange quark-antiquark virtual pairs. Measurements by the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory reveal a relative polarization signal of (18 ± 4)% that links the virtual spin-correlated quark pairs from the QCD vacuum to their final-state hadron counterparts. Crucially, this correlation vanishes when the hyperon pairs are widely separated in angle, consistent with the decoherence of the quantum system. Our findings provide a new experimental model for exploring the dynamics and interplay of quark confinement and entanglement.