Making Sense of Bell’s Theorem and Quantum Nonlocality

Federico Laudisa

Shan Gao

It may well be that a relativistic version of the theory, while Lorentz invariant and local at the observational level, may be necessarily non-local and with a preferred frame (or aether) at the fundamental level. – John Bell [1] Introduction Bell's theorem establishes a contradiction between locality (and a few other assumptions) and certain predictions of quantum mechanics [2]. There have been two main issues surrounding the deep implications of this celebrated theorem. The first issue is basic, and it concerns whether the theorem really establishes that nonlocality is a necessary feature of any empirically viable theory and hence a feature of nature itself. One aspect of the issue concerns exactly what the underlying assumptions of Bell's theorem are. For example, some argue that these assumptions include the assumption of counterfactual definiteness [3–5], while others disagree [6–8]. The other aspect of the issue concerns which assumption should be dropped due to the resulting contradiction. Some believe that standard quantum mechanics may avoid nonlocality by denying counterfactual definiteness [3–5]. The second issue is much deeper, and it concerns how to make sense of the strange nonlocality when assuming that Bell's theorem establishes that our world is nonlocal. In particular, it has yet to be determined whether such quantum nonlocality is compatible with the theory of relativity, e.g., whether the nonlocality requires the existence of a preferred Lorentz frame [7, 9, 10]. It seems that “there is a preferred frame of reference, and in this preferred frame of reference things do go faster than light … Behind the apparent Lorentz invariance of the phenomena, there is a deeper level which is not Lorentz invariant” [11]. But it also seems possible that the existence of a preferred Lorentz frame is an illusion, since it cannot be detected according to standard quantum mechanics. A more subtle issue is whether quantum nonlocality permits superluminal signaling. It is widely thought that the answers to these questions will lead to a deeper understanding of Bell's theorem and quantum nonlocality. In this paper, we will present a new analysis of quantum nonlocality and its apparent incompatibility with relativity.

Federico Laudisa

In a recent paper [arXiv:1703.11003] on this journal Stephen Boughn argued that quantum mechanics does not require nonlocality of any kind and that the common interpretation of Bell theorem as a nonlocality result is based on a misunderstanding. In this note I argue that the Boughn arguments, that summarize views widespread in certain areas of the foundations of quantum mechanics, are based on an incorrect reading of the presuppositions of the EPR argument and the Bell theorem and, as a consequence, are totally unfounded.

Peter Rastall

Dipankar Home

I. S. Eliëns, S. G. A. Brito, R. Chaves

Bell's theorem, stating that quantum predictions are incompatible with a local hidden variable description, is a cornerstone of quantum theory and at the center of many quantum information processing protocols.Over the years, different perspectives on nonlocality have been put forward as well as different ways to detect nonlocality and quantify it.Unfortunately, and in spite of its relevance, as the complexity of the Bell scenario increases, deciding whether a given observed correlation is nonlocal becomes computationally intractable.Here, we propose to analyze a Bell scenario as a tensor network, a perspective permitting us to test and quantify nonlocality, resorting to very efficient algorithms originating from compressed sensing and that offer a significant speedup in comparison with standard linear programming methods.We use that all nonsignaling correlations can be described by hidden variable models governed by a quasiprobability, a fact we prove with simple linear algebra methods.