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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Statistical analysis of recent experiments closing the detection loophole with photons, and implications

Peter Bierhorst

Published Mar 6, 2014• 0 citations
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Recent experiments have reached detection efficiencies sufficient to close the detection loophole with photons. Both experiments ran multiple successive trials in fixed measurement configurations, rather than randomly re-setting the measurement configurations before each measurement trial. This opens a new potential loophole for a local hidden variable theory. The loophole invalidates one proposed method of statistical analysis of the experimental results, as demonstrated in this note. Therefore a different analysis will be necessary to definitively assert that these experiments are subject only to the locality loophole.
Recent experiments (Giustina et al 2013 Nature 497 227–30 ; Christensen et al 2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 111 130406 ) have reached detection efficiencies sufficient to close the detection loophole, testing the Clauser–Horne version of Bell's inequality. For a similar future experiment to be completely loophole-free, it will be important to have discrete experimental trials with randomized measurement settings for each trial, and the statistical analysis should not overlook the possibility of a local state varying over time with possible dependence on earlier trials (the ‘memory loophole’). In this paper, a mathematical model for such an experiment is presented, and a method for statistical analysis that is robust to memory effects is introduced. Additionally, a new method for calculating exact p -values for martingale-based statistics is described; previously, only non-sharp upper bounds derived from the Azuma–Hoeffding inequality have been available for such statistics. This improvement decreases the required number of experimental trials to demonstrate non-locality. The statistical techniques are applied to the data of Giustina et al (2013 Nature 497 227–30 ) and Christensen et al (2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 111 130406 ) and found to perform well.
Exhaustively identifying all loopholes in the Bell test is demanding for interpreting the results of the relevant experiments, since any loophole if not closed can be catastrophic to our understanding of the nonlocal structure of quantum mechanics. Despite a series of recent Bell experiments that claim to be free of loopholes, a united framework with a sound base is still missing to fully recognize all potential loopholes in these experiments, as verified by a recent experiment that has pinned down a detection loophole of a new type in Bell analysis. Here, we reveal another loophole previously unknown in the Bell test through a local theory developed here on the basis of a new mathematical concept of high-dimensional vectorial probability, quantified as a vector with interesting but hidden geometry in the probability space. We show that the statistical property of the stochastic events generated for the Bell test can be well described by the local theory, and, in particular, the correlations of these events that violate Bell's theorem can be closely connected to the geometry of the vectorial probability. To close the loophole, theoretical investigations are highly recommended to search for the statistical nature of the stochastic events in quantum measurements that can distinguish the predictions of quantum mechanics and those of the local theory.