Entanglement in elastic and inelastic two-particle scatterings at high energy

We study the entanglement produced in transverse momentum by two-particle scattering at high energy. Employing the S-matrix framework for the derivation of reduced density matrices, we formulate the entanglement entropy for an inelastic scattering as well as an elastic one. We display the formulas of the entanglement entropy in terms of two-body cross sections. We also derive the entanglement density as a function of the transverse momentum. As an application, we then focus on both forward elastic ( p n → p n ) and inelastic ( p n → n p ) channels scattering allowing for a fruitful comparison of the two reactions with the same proton-neutron content. We evaluate the elastic and inelastic entanglement entropy by using known parametrizations of experimental data for neutron-proton reactions. Comparing those entanglement entropies, we observe that the inelastic scattering produces more overall entanglement than the elastic one in the p n sector.