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Cosmic Bell Test using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars

Quantum Physics 2018-08-22 v1

Abstract

In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago, the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell's inequality by 9.39.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated pp value of 7.4×1021\lesssim 7.4 \times 10^{-21}. This experiment pushes back to at least 7.8\sim 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the "freedom-of-choice" loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96%96\% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.05966,
  title  = {Cosmic Bell Test using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars},
  author = {Dominik Rauch and Johannes Handsteiner and Armin Hochrainer and Jason Gallicchio and Andrew S. Friedman and Calvin Leung and Bo Liu and Lukas Bulla and Sebastian Ecker and Fabian Steinlechner and Rupert Ursin and Beili Hu and David Leon and Chris Benn and Adriano Ghedina and Massimo Cecconi and Alan H. Guth and David I. Kaiser and Thomas Scheidl and Anton Zeilinger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.05966},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

9 pages, 4 figures, plus Supplemental Material (16 pages, 8 figures). Matches version to be published in Physical Review Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:37:07.772Z