We show that a Bell inequality test using an optical hybrid state between a polarized single photon and a coherent field can be highly robust against detection inefficiency. The Bell violation occurs until the efficiency becomes as low as 67% even though its degree becomes small as the detection efficiency degrades. We consider on/off and photon number parity measurements, respectively, for the Bell test and they result in the similar conditions. If the detection efficiency is higher than 98.68%, parity measurements give larger Bell violations close to Cirel'son's bound, while on/off measurements give larger but moderate violations for realistic values of detector efficiency. Experimental realization of our proposal seems feasible in the near future for the implementation of a loophole-free Bell inequality test.
We show that a Bell inequality test using an optical hybrid state between a polarized single photon and a coherent field can be highly robust against detection inefficiency. The Bell violation occurs until the efficiency becomes as low as 67% even though its degree becomes small as the detection efficiency degrades. We consider on/off and photon number parity measurements, respectively, for the Bell test and they result in similar conditions. If the detection efficiency is higher than 98.68%, parity measurements give larger Bell violations close to Cirel'son's bound, while on/off measurements give larger but moderate violations for realistic values of detector efficiency. Experimental realization of our proposal seems feasible in the near future for the implementation of a loophole-free Bell inequality test.
Svetlichny's inequality (SI) is a Bell-like inequality, the violation of which can be used to confirm the existence of genuine multipartite correlations. However, poor detector efficiency can possibly cause a so-called detection loophole in actual Svetlichny experiments. We derive an alternative SI to deal with this loophole. If the experimental data can violate this SI, it must result in loophole-free violation of the original SI. We show that the minimum detection efficiency needed for a loophole-free violation of the tripartite SI is about
0.97. For the general case of
n particles, we give the analytic expression of the needed detection efficiency, and find that its value monotonically and rapidly approaches 1 as the number of particles increases.