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Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) pointed out that the quantum-mechanical description of physical reality implied an unphysical, instantaneous action between distant measurements. To avoid such an action at a distance, EPR concluded that Quantum Mechanics had to be incomplete. However, its extensions involving additional hidden variables, allowing for the recovery of determinism and locality, have been disproved experimentally (Bells theorem). Here, I present an opposite solution of the paradox based on the greater indeterminism of the modern Quantum Field Theory (QFT) description of Particle Physics, that prevents the preparation of any state having a definite number of particles. The resulting uncertainty in photons radiation has interesting consequences in Quantum Information Theory (e.g. cryptography and teleportation). Moreover, since it allows for less elements of EPR physical reality than the old non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics, QFT satisfies the EPR condition of completeness without the need of hidden variables. The residual physical reality does never violate locality, thus the unique objective proof of quantum nonlocality is removed in an interpretation-independent way. On the other hand, the supposed nonlocality of the EPR correlations turns out to be a problem of the interpretation of the theory. If we do not rely on hidden variables or new physics beyond QFT, the unique viable interpretation is a minimal statistical one, that preserves locality and Lorentz symmetry.
This Colloquium examines the field of the EPR Gedankenexperiment, from the original paper of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, through to modern theoretical proposals of how to realize both the continuous-variable and discre
Certification and quantification of correlations for multipartite states of quantum systems appear to be a central task in quantum information theory. We give here a unitary quantum-mechanical perspective of both entanglement and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering of continuous-variable multimode states. This originates in the Heisenberg uncertainty relations for the canonical quadrature operators of the modes. Correlations of two-party $(N, text{vs} ,1)$-mode states are examined by using the variances of a pair of suitable EPR-like observables. It turns out that the uncertainty sum of these nonlocal variables is bounded from below by local uncertainties and is strengthened differently for separable states and for each one-way unsteerable ones. The analysis of the minimal properly normalized sums of these variances yields necessary conditions of separability and EPR unsteerability of $(N, text{vs} ,1)$-mode states in both possible ways of steering. When the states and the performed measurements are Gaussian, then these conditions are precisely the previously-known criteria of separability and one-way unsteerability.
Spatial entanglement is at the heart of quantum enhanced imaging applications and high-dimensional quantum information protocols. In particular, for imaging and sensing applications, quantum states with a macroscopic number of photons are needed to provide a real advantage over the classical state-of-the-art. We demonstrate the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox in its original position and momentum form with bright twin beams of light by showing the presence of EPR spatial (position-momentum) entanglement. An electron-multiplying charge-coupled-device camera is used to record images of the bright twin beams in the near and far field regimes to achieve an apparent violation of the uncertainty principle by more than an order of magnitude. We further show that the presence of quantum correlations in the spatial and temporal degrees of freedom leads to spatial squeezing between the spatial fluctuations of the bright twin beams in both the near and far fields. This provides another verification of the spatial entanglement and points to the presence of hyperentanglement in the bright twin beams.
The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox is one of the milestones in quantum foundations, arising from the lack of local realistic description of quantum mechanics. The EPR paradox has stimulated an important concept of quantum nonlocality, which manifests itself by three different types: quantum entanglement, quantum steering, and Bell nonlocality. Although Bell nonlocality is more often used to show the quantum nonlocality, the original EPR paradox is essentially a steering paradox. In this work, we formulate the original EPR steering paradox into a contradiction equality,thus making it amenable to an experimental verification. We perform an experimental test of the steering paradox in a two-qubit scenario. Furthermore, by starting from the steering paradox, we generate a generalized linear steering inequality and transform this inequality into a mathematically equivalent form, which is more friendly for experimental implementation, i.e., one may only measure the observables in $x$-, $y$-, or $z$-axis of the Bloch sphere, rather than other arbitrary directions. We also perform experiments to demonstrate this scheme. Within the experimental errors, the experimental results coincide with the theoretical predictions. Our results deepen the understanding of quantum foundations and provide an efficient way to detect the steerability of quantum states.
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering is a form of bipartite quantum correlation that is intermediate between entanglement and Bell nonlocality. It allows for entanglement certification when the measurements performed by one of the parties are not characterised (or are untrusted) and has applications in quantum key distribution. Despite its foundational and applied importance, EPR steering lacks a quantitative assessment. Here we propose a way of quantifying this phenomenon and use it to study the steerability of several quantum states. In particular we show that every pure entangled state is maximally steerable, the projector onto the anti-symmetric subspace is maximally steerable for all dimensions, we provide a new example of one-way steering, and give strong support that states with positive-partial-transposition are not steerable.