Physica Scripta
The Einstein?Podolsky?Rosen debate: on the way to a final answer
Edward S. Fry, Thomas Walther, Robert A. Kenefick
Abstract
The status of our experimental realization of Bohm’s spin-1/2 particle version of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen gedankenexperiment is discussed. This new experiment provides a definitive test of the, as yet, untested strong Bell inequalities. It closes the two widely recognized loopholes associated with previous experiments, and has the interesting new feature that the entangled state exists for milliseconds rather than nanoseconds. The spin one-half particles are two 199 Hg atoms in an entangled nuclear spin state with total nuclear spin zero. Measurement of the nuclear spin correlation is achieved by detection of each atom using a spin state selective two photon excitation-ionization scheme.