  We study low-energy scattering 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. The baryon transforms
as an octet under the SU(3) flavor symmetry and its interactions below the pion
threshold are described by contact operators in an effective field theory (EFT)
of QCD. Despite there being 64 channels in the 2-to-2 scattering, only six
independent operators in the EFT are predicted by SU(3). We show that
successive entanglement minimization in SU(3)-symmetric channels are correlated
with increasingly large emergent symmetries in the EFT. In particular, we
identify scattering channels whose entanglement suppression are indicative of
emergent SU(6), SO(8), SU(8), and SU(16) symmetries. We also observe the
appearance of non-relativistic conformal invariance in channels with
unnaturally large scattering lengths. Improved precision from lattice
simulations could help determine the degree of entanglement suppression, and
consequently the amount of accidental symmetry, in low-energy QCD.
