Contextuality is a fundamental property of quantum mechanics. Contrary to entanglement, which can only exist in composite systems, contextuality is also present for single entities. The case of a three-level system is of particular interest because—in agreement with the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem—it is the simplest in which quantum contextuality is necessarily present. We verify that the polarizations of spin-1 massive particles produced at collider experiments indeed exhibit contextuality. To this purpose we consider $W$ gauge bosons produced in top-quark decays, $J/\psi$ and $K^{*}{\left(892\right)}^0$ mesons created in $B$-meson decays, and $\varphi$ mesons resulting from ${\chi }_c^0$ charmonium decays, making use of the data collected and analyzed by the ATLAS, LHCb, and BESIII collaborations, respectively. The polarizations of all these four particles show contextuality with a significance of more than $5\sigma$.

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• Quantum correlations, foundations & formalism
• Quantum entanglement
• Quantum tomography
• Gauge bosons
• Polarization