Study of Quantum Decoherence in Neutral B Meson pairs produced at the $\Upsilon(5S)$ Resonance

Sammanfattning

This thesis presents the development and validation of an analysis framework to study quantum decoherence in neutral B-meson pairs produced at the $\Upsilon(5S)$ resonance, using Monte Carlo simulated data from the Belle experiment. Unlike the $\Upsilon(4S)$, the $\Upsilon(5S)$ provides access to both antisymmetric ($C=-1$) and symmetric ($C=+1$) quantum states through the channels $B^0\bar{B}^0$, $B^{0*}\bar{B}^0+c.c.$, and $B^{0*}\bar{B}^{0*}$. Decoherence effects are studied with the Partial Spontaneous Disentanglement model, which introduces a fraction $\zeta$ of $B^{0*}\bar{B}^{*0}$ pairs disentangled at production. The analysis exploits the decay times of both neutral B mesons, for which time-dependent probability density functions are derived and extended to include detector-resolution effects. The framework is first validated on Signal Monte Carlo samples, where one-dimensional fits to $\Sigma t$ successfully recover the expected decoherence values for both entangled and disentangled configurations. Fits to Generic Monte Carlo samples, which include realistic backgrounds and event compositions, reveal strong correlations between the decoherence parameter and flavour-tagging wrong-tag fractions, particularly in the $C=-1$ channels. The results from these fits show significant deviations from expected $\zeta$ values and large uncertainties. Pure Toy Monte Carlo studies confirm that the fitter behaves linearly with respect to the injected decoherence parameter and show only small biases consistent with those observed in the nominal fits, but too small to fully explain them. To address the limitations of the single fits, a two-dimensional analysis in $(\Delta t,\Sigma t)$ is developed. By exploiting the full time-dependent information, the two-dimensional fit significantly reduces the statistical uncertainty on the decoherence parameter from $\sim\mathcal{O}(10\%)$ to $\sim\mathcal{O}(4\%)$ and mitigates correlations with the flavour-tagging parameters. This work constitutes a proof of concept for future analyses on Belle data and demonstrates the potential of the $\Upsilon(5S)$ system for studying quantum entanglement and decoherence in neutral B mesons.