The year 2015 marks 80 years since Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen argued for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, in the process describing one of the most counterintuitive characteristics of quantum mechanics: distant measurements can influence the character of local quantum states. This led to reactions from Schrodinger, Bohr, and John Bell. This issue shows that these developments are still well under way, with new foundational insights on the history of steering and Bell-nonlocality, new directions in the mathematical characterization of EPR-steering, demonstrations in quantum optical experiments, and further connections with quantum information processing.
The year 2015 marks 80 years since Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen argued for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, in the process describing one of the most counterintuitive characteristics of quantum mechanics: distant measurements can influence the character of local quantum states. This led to reactions from Schrodinger, Bohr, and John Bell. This issue shows that these developments are still well under way, with new foundational insights on the history of steering and Bell-nonlocality, new directions in the mathematical characterization of EPR-steering, demonstrations in quantum optical experiments, and further connections with quantum information processing.
The Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paradox is one of the milestones in quantum foundations, arising from the lack of a local realistic description of quantum mechanics. The EPR paradox has stimulated an important concept of “quantum nonlocality,” which manifests itself in three types: quantum entanglement, quantum steering, and Bell’s nonlocality. Although Bell’s nonlocality is more often used to show “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 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 friendlier for experimental implementation, i.e., one may measure the observables only in the 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 theoretical predictions. Our results deepen the understanding of quantum foundations and provide an efficient way to detect the steerability of quantum states.
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.
We formally link the concept of steering (a concept created by Schr\"odinger but only recently formalized by Wiseman, Jones, and Doherty [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 140402 (2007)]) and the criteria for demonstrations of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox introduced by Reid [Phys. Rev. A 40, 913 (1989)]. We develop a general theory of experimental EPR-steering criteria, derive a number of criteria applicable to discrete as well as continuous-variable observables, and study their efficacy in detecting that form of nonlocality in some classes of quantum states. We show that previous versions of EPR-type criteria can be rederived within this formalism, thus unifying these efforts from a modern quantum-information perspective and clarifying their conceptual and formal origin. The theory follows in close analogy with criteria for other forms of quantum nonlocality (Bell nonlocality and entanglement), and because it is a hybrid of those two, it may lead to insights into the relationship between the different forms of nonlocality and the criteria that are able to detect them.
In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published their influential paper proposing a now famous paradox (the EPR paradox) that threw doubt on the completeness of quantum mechanics. Two fundamental concepts: entanglement and steering, were given in the response to the EPR paper by Schrodinger, which both reflect the nonlocal nature of quantum mechanics. In 1964, John Bell obtained an experimentally testable inequality, in which its violation contradicts the prediction of local hidden variable models and agrees with that of quantum mechanics. Since then, great efforts have been made to experimentally investigate the nonlocal feature of quantum mechanics and many distinguished quantum properties were observed. In this work, along with the discussion of the development of quantum nonlocality, we would focus on our recent experimental efforts in investigating quantum correlations and their applications with optical systems, including the study of entanglement-assisted entropic uncertainty principle, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering and the dynamics of quantum correlations.
The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox is one of the earliest paradoxes, arising from the lack of local realistic description of mechanics. The EPR paradox leads to the important concept of quantum which manifests itself by three different phenomena: entanglement, steering, and Bell's nonlocality. Two well-known paradoxes related to Bell's nonlocality, i.e. the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger paradox and the Hardy paradox, have been widely studied and also experimentally confirmed. However, an experimental test of the EPR paradox is still lacking. The EPR paradox is essentially a steering paradox, and recently it has been mathematically formulated as a contradiction equality k=1, thus making it amenable to an experimental verification. Moreover, based on the EPR paradox we also derive a generalized linear steering inequality. In this work, we perform the first experimental test of the EPR paradox in a two-qubit scenario, and also verify the corresponding generalized steering inequality, which has an advantage over the usual one by detecting more steerability of states. Experimental results confirm the theoretical predictions within the experimental errors, and provide a deeper understanding of foundation.
Correlations between distant particles are central to many puzzles and paradoxes of quantum mechanics and, at the same time, underpin various applications such as quantum cryptography and metrology. Originally in 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) used these correlations to argue against the completeness of quantum mechanics. To formalize their argument, Schrödinger subsequently introduced the notion of quantum steering. Still, the question of which quantum states can be used for EPR steering and which cannot remained open. Here we show that quantum steering can be viewed as an inclusion problem in convex geometry. For the case of two spin-1/2 particles, this approach completely characterizes the set of states leading to EPR steering. In addition, we discuss the generalization to higher-dimensional systems as well as generalized measurements. Our results find applications in various protocols in quantum information processing, and moreover they are linked to quantum mechanical phenomena such as uncertainty relations and the question of which observables in quantum mechanics are jointly measurable.