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I'm not a physicist, but I've always wondered about Caroline Thompson's work, like:

"Chaotic Ball" model, local realism and the Bell test loopholes

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0210150

...any thoughts?




The scrutiny that Bell test experiments get from loophole people is always much appreciated, but the problem with Aspect's results in particular is that lovely parenthetical remark that appears in several of his figures, to the tune of "The dotted line is not a fit to the data, but the quantum mechanical prediction for this result."

While it is easy to imagine selective-detection effects that mess up the results enough to invalidate the test at the level of the inequality, it is very, very difficult to maintain all the physics required for precise, detailed agreement between theory and experiment of the kind that Aspect and others have shown. Here is an example of a "local realistic model" that reproduces the quantum mechanical results for in-time coincidences, but completely messes up any number of auxiliary measurements: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=590

So while I'd love to see a modern version of Aspect's work using state-of-the-art entangled photon sources and the like, the likely reason it hasn't been done is that the odds of it revealing anything new and different are trivially small (but not zero, of course!)




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