On the Many Uses of Polarized Quarks and Hadrons at the LHC

by Johannes Michel

Wednesday 12 Nov 2025, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Rome

A501 (Dip.to di Fisica Univ. Genova)

Because the LHC collides unpolarized protons, no individual particle in the intermediate or final state of the collision can have nonzero spin expectation value in isolation. Nevertheless, spin-spin and spin-orbit correlations between quarks and/or hadrons are very much allowed, and give rise to fascinating new phenomenology that the growing LHC data set is just beginning to let us explore. In this talk I describe two particularly exciting applications of such correlations. In the first part, I describe how the mathematics of Bell tests can be recycled to test whether hadronization admits a classical stochastic description. (A question that is distinct from the usual, oft-debated proposal to perform Bell tests of Nature at colliders.) In the second part, I describe how the rich physics of spin-orbit correlations between quarks and hadrons in nonperturbative QCD leads to new, powerful probes of the Higgs Yukawa coupling to first and second-generation quarks.