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Gedanken experiments of entanglement in particle physics: Interactions, operators and Bell-type inequalities in flavor space

Corbin Pacheco* and Nausheen R. Shah†

  • *Contact author: cpacheco@wayne.edu
  • †Contact author: nausheen.shah@wayne.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 013012 – Published 27 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/cm6s-3ztv

Abstract

We propose Bell-type inequalities by constructing flavor operators associated with mass identification, flavor change, and charged-current weak mixing which arise from fundamental interactions in the Standard Model. We treat these interactions as measurement settings in a gedanken experiment. For entangled two-particle states, the measurement outcomes of these flavor operators exhibit correlations that violate a Bell-type inequality under the stated assumptions, showing that our result probes contextuality and incompatibility of interaction-defined observables. We discuss how the predicted correlation patterns may be probed with experimental data, clarifying the scope and limitations of Bell-type reasoning in particle physics.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 013012– Published 27 July, 2026
  • Received 11 February 2026
  • Accepted 1 July 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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