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7 - Experimental Tests of Bell Inequalities

from Part II - Bell's Theorem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2016

By
Marco Genovese
Edited by
Mary Bell  and
Shan Gao
Marco Genovese
Affiliation:
Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica
Shan Gao
Affiliation:
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
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Summary

Introduction

Annus mirabilis 1964

1964 was a wonderful year for physics. In this annus mirabilis, summarising and simplifying a little, the quark model was proposed by Gell-Mann and Zweig and charm and colour properties were introduced, Higgs published his work on the scalar boson, the _ boson and CP violation were discovered, cosmic background radiation was identified and, finally, Bell inequalities were suggested.

Most of these works were later subjects of a Nobel prize. Unluckily John Bell left us too early for this achievement, but, at least in my opinion, his work [1] is probably the most fruitful among all these huge advances, since now we can recognise that it was the root of a fundamental change in our vision of the physical world, providing, on one hand, the possibility of a test of quantum mechanics against a whole class of theories (substantially all the theories that we could define as “classical”) and, on the other hand, introducing a clear notion of quantum nonlocality that represents not only a challenge in understanding quantum mechanics, but also one of the most important resources paving the way to quantum technologies that were developed in the last decades based on the quantum correlations discussed in the Bell paper.

In the following we will present the experimental progress in testing Bell inequalities. Rather amazingly even 50 years after Bell's paper, a conclusive test of his proposal is still missing [2, 3].

Nevertheless, huge progress has been achieved with respect to the first experiments.We will discuss these developments and the remaining problems for a conclusive test of Bell inequalities in detail.

The Bell Inequalities, Their Hypotheses and the Experimental Loopholes

In order to understand the experimental difficulties in achieving a final test of Bell inequalities, let us analyse a little how these inequalities are derived and the explicit and implicit hypotheses they contain.

The proof of Bell inequalities usually starts by considering two separated subsystems of an entangled state, which are addressed to two independent measurement apparatuses measuring the expectation values of two dichotomic observables, Aa and Bb. a, b are two parameters describing the settings of the measuring apparatus A and B, respectively.

Type
Chapter
Information
Quantum Nonlocality and Reality
50 Years of Bell's Theorem
 , pp. 124 - 140
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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