Bell Test over Extremely High-Loss Channels: Towards Distributing Entangled Photon Pairs between Earth and the Moon.

Abstract

Quantum entanglement was termed "spooky action at a distance" in the well-known paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. Entanglement is expected to be distributed over longer and longer distances in both practical applications and fundamental research into the principles of nature. Here, we present a proposal for distributing entangled photon pairs between Earth and the Moon using a Lagrangian point at a distance of 1.28 light seconds. One of the most fascinating features in this long-distance distribution of entanglement is as follows. One can perform the Bell test with human supplying the random measurement settings and recording the results while still maintaining spacelike intervals. To realize a proof-of-principle experiment, we develop an entangled photon source with 1GHz generation rate, about 2 orders of magnitude higher than previous results. Violation of Bell's inequality was observed under a total simulated loss of 103dB with measurement settings chosen by two experimenters. This demonstrates the feasibility of such long-distance Bell test over extremely high-loss channels, paving the way for one of the ultimate tests of the foundations of quantum mechanics.