CP violation in correlated production and decay of unstable particles

Abstract

We study resonant CP-violating Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen correlations that may take place in the production and decay of unstable scalar particles at high-energy colliders. We show that as a consequence of unitarity and CPT invariance of the S-matrix, in 2 → 2 scatterings mediated by mixed scalar particles, at least three linearly independent decay matrices associated with the unstable scalar states are needed to obtain non-zero CP-odd observables that are also odd under C-conjugation. Instead, for the correlated production and decay of two unstable particle systems in 2 → 4 processes, we find that only two independent decay matrices are sufficient to induce a net non-vanishing CP-violating phenomenon. As an application of this theorem, we present numerical estimates of CP asymmetries for the correlated production and decay of supersymmetric scalar top–anti-top pairs at the LHC, and demonstrate that these could reach values of order one. As a byproduct of our analysis, we develop a novel spinorial trace technique, which enables us to efficiently evaluate lengthy expressions of squared amplitudes describing the resonant scalar transitions.