Physicist Reinhold Bertlmann of the University of Vienna, Austria has published a review of the work of his late long-term collaborator John Stewart Bell of CERN, Geneva, “Real or Not Real: that is the question,” explores Bell’s inequalities and his concepts of reality and explains their relevance to quantum information and its applications.
The distinguished quantum physicist John Stewart Bell (1928-1990) is best known for the eponymous theorem that proved current understanding of quantum mechanics to be incompatible with local hidden variable theories. This theorem set out, mathematically, the contrast between quantum mechanical theories and local realism.
Bell spent most of his working life at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and Bertlmann first met him when he took up a short-term fellowship there in 1978. Bell had first presented his theorem in a seminal paper published in 1964, but this was largely neglected until the 1980s and the introduction of quantum information.
Bertlmann discusses the concept of Bell inequalities, which arise through thought experiments in which a pair of spin-½ particles propagate in opposite directions and are measured by independent observers, Alice and Bob. The Bell inequality distinguishes between local realism—the ‘common sense’ view in which Alice’s observations do not depend on Bob’s, and vice versa—and quantum mechanics, or, specifically, quantum entanglement. Two quantum particles, such as those in the Alice-Bob situation, are entangled when the state measured by one observer instantaneously influences that of the other. This theory is the basis of quantum information. (Phys.org)
The paper has been published in The European Physical Journal H.
