Abstract
We study low-energy scatterings of spin-1/2 baryons from the perspective of quantum information science, focusing on the correlation between entanglement minimization and the appearance of accidental symmetries. Interactions of the octet baryons below the pion threshold are described by contact operators in an EFT of QCD. Despite there being 64 channels in the 2-to-2 scattering, only 6 independent operators in the EFT are predicted by SU(3) flavor symmetry. We show that successive entanglement minimization in SU(3)-symmetric channels lead to increasingly large emerging symmetries in the EFT. In particular, we identify scattering channels whose entanglement suppression would lead to emergent SU(6), SO(8) and SU(8) flavor symmetries, as well as SU(16) spin-flavor symmetry.