Entanglement and accidental symmetries in the nucleon-nucleon system

Journal article, 2026

We study the connection between accidental symmetries in the nuclear interaction and spin entanglement in two-nucleon scattering. Specifically, we incorporate different levels of Wigner SU(4) and Serber symmetries into leading-order potentials derived from chiral effective field theory. We conduct a quantitative analysis by computing the full S matrix, demonstrating that the neutron-proton spin entanglement can be related to the symmetry properties of the interaction and the presence of certain operators and partial waves. Furthermore, we study the order-by-order evolution of the spin entanglement, up to next-to-next-to-leading order in Weinberg power counting, for both neutron-proton and neutron-neutron scattering. Entanglement suppression is not observed in neutron-neutron scattering, which can be attributed to the Pauli principle and the absence of accidental symmetries in this system. We conclude that entanglement is a useful guide for studying the power counting and symmetries in nuclear interactions derived from effective field theories.