Physicists test real quantum theory

Zheng-Da Li and Ya-Li Mao preparing the experiment. Credit: Li et al.

Researchers at Southern University of Science and Technology in China, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and other institutes worldwide have recently adapted Bell tests so that they could be implemented in state-of-the-art photonic systems. 

They experimentally demonstrates the existence of quantum correlations in an optical network that cannot be explained by real quantum theory.

In the 1960s, the Swiss physicist Ernst Stueckelberg and his colleagues successfully formulated quantum theory in real Hilbert spaces. While this was an important milestone in the field, their formulation did not use the renowned, so-called “tensor product” to compose different systems. This essentially means that their formulation is not consistent with what is known as “real quantum theory.”

While it has been successfully applied in many studies, Bell’s theorem alone is not powerful enough to accurately predict the differences between real and complex quantum theories. The team has been able to assess these differences by considering a quantum network with multiple, independent sources.

Their experiment disproves real quantum theory as a universal physical theory, clearly showing that not all predictions based on standard quantum theory with complex numbers can be modeled by the real-number analog of standard quantum theory. (Phys.org)

Their paper has been published in Physical Review Letters.

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