COLLOQUIUM "Testing Locality via Bell’s Inequality and/or Entanglement at Colliders?" by Herbert Dreiner (Bonn)

Friday 13 Dec 2024, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Amsterdam

In 2022 the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger for the work on the foundations of quantum mechanics. In particular Aspect performed a fundamental test of locality via Bell’s inequality using pairs of correlated photons from an atomic transition. That is: is Nature inherently local, or is it non-local as predicted by QM? Since 2022 there has been a surge of interest in whether such a test can be performed at high energy colliders with fermions using self-analyzing decays, with many claims in the affirmative. We argue that it is NOT possible to perform such a test for fundamental reasons, and it is similarly NOT possible to demonstrate entanglement at colliders. The talk should be accessible with a basic understanding of QM.