The
Aspect
experimenfs
139
4.4
THE
ASPECT
EXPERIMENTS
It
is
probably
reasonable
to
suppose
that
the derivation, in the late
19605
and
early 1970s,
of
an equation which
is
demoMtrahly
violated by a
quantum
theory then over 40 years
old
should have settled
the
matter
one
way
or
the
other,
once and for all. Correlated
quantum
panicles
are
everywhere in physics
and
chemistry, the simplest
and
most obvious
example being the helium
atom,
an
understanding
of
the
spectroscopy
of
which
had
led
to
the introduction
of
the Pauli principle in the first place.
Blit
it
became
apparent
that the special circumstances
under
which Bell's.
inequality could be subjected
to
experimental test had never been realized
in the
laboratory.
Suddenly, the race was on
to
perfect
an
apparatus
that could
be
used
to
perform
the
necessary measurements
on
pairs
of
correlated
quantum
particles.
As early as 1946, the physicist
John
Wheeler,
then
at
Princeton
University,
had
proposed studies
on
correlated
photons
produced by
electron
-positron
annihilation. But the polarization correlations
of
two photOns emitted in rapid succession (in a 'cascade') from an excited
state
of
the calcium
alom
proved
to
be the most accessible to experi-
ment
and
ultimately closest to the ideal. Carl A. Kocher
and
Eugene
D.
Commins
at
the University
of
California
at
Berkeley used this source
in
1966
ill a
study
of
correlations between the linear polarization states
of
the
photons,
altbough they did
not
explicitly set
out
to test Bell's
inequality.
The
first such direct tests were performed in 1972,
by
Stuart J.
Freedman
and
John
F, Clauser at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory
in
California,
who also used the calcium
atom
source. These experiments
produced
the violations
of
Bell's inequality predicted by
quantum
theory
but,
because
of
some further 'auxiliary' assumptions
that
were necessary
in
order
to
extrapolate the
data,
only a weaker form
of
the inequality was
tested. These auxiliary assumptions left unsatisfactory loopholes for the
ardent
supporters
of
local hidden variables
to
exploit.
It
could still be
argued
then
that the evidence against such hidden variables was only
circumstantiaL
To
date-;-lhe best, most comprehensive experiments designed speci-
fically to test the general form
of
Bell's inequality were those performed
by Alain Aspect
and
his colleagues Philippe Grangier,
Gerard
Roger
and
Jean
Dalibard,
at
the Institut d'Optique Theoretique et Appliquee,
Universite Paris-Sud in Orsay, in
1981
and 1982. These scientists also
made
use
of
cascade emission from excited calcium
atoms
as a source
of
correlated
photons.
We
will
!lOW
examine the physics
of
this emission
process in detaiL