2026/04/17 by Dorival Gonçalves, Ajay Kaladharan, Alberto Navarro · 1 voice
#hep-ph #hep-ex #quant-ph
Angular correlations in Higgs decays to electroweak gauge bosons, h → ZZ^*, WW^*, provide a powerful probe of both new physics effects and quantum information observables. We present a systematic study of semi-leptonic Higgs decays h → V V^* → ℓ+ℓ- qq and ℓ^± ν_ℓ qq', including finite final state fermion masses, NLO QCD, and NLO electroweak corrections. We show that finite final state quark masses can induce effects that go beyond the two-qutrit description in more inclusive regimes, while remaining controllable with suitable kinematic selections. QCD corrections lead to modest percent-level shifts, whereas electroweak corrections can significantly modify the angular structure, particularly in the h→ ZZ^* channels. We assess the impact of these effects on the reconstructed density matrix and entanglement measures, finding that, although they modify the angular observables, the semi-leptonic channels are better approximated by a two-qutrit description than the fully leptonic decay h→ e+e-μ+μ-.