Deep inelastic scattering as a probe of entanglement: the complete QCD dipole cascade

Abstract

We study entanglement entropy in Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) using the dipole formulation of the high-energy limit of QCD. We argue that a reduced density matrix arises in low $x$ DIS due to a trace over unobserved color degrees of freedom and we obtain entanglement entropy in terms of dipole multiplicities, directly from the von Neumann entropy. Dipole multiplicities are obtained from a solution to low $x$ evolution equations, which we solve numerically. Unlike previous studies, we take into account both transverse-size and azimuthal-angle dependence in the dipole evolution kernel. We study both the exact solution of the equation as well as its double leading-logarithmic approximation (DLLA). We find that for the same initial dipole size, the DLLA solution generates a larger entropy. Finally, we calculate the dipole multiplicities and entanglement entropy and compare our results to the Shannon entropy of hadron multiplicities, as measured by the H1 collaboration.