Abstract
Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory; however, there is still much debate concerning what a quantum state truly represents. One such century-old debate is whether a quantum state is ontic or epistemic. Recently, a no-go theorem was proposed, stating that the continuous ψ-epistemic models cannot reproduce the measurement statistic of quantum states. Here we experimentally test this theorem with high-dimensional single photon quantum states without additional assumptions except for the fair-sampling assumption. Our experimental results reproduce the prediction of quantum theory and support the no-go theorem.
Highlights
Multi-photons was used in the experiment[17]
We report an experimental test of the existence of the continuous ψ-epistemic models with high-dimensional single photon quantum states
The δ-continuous ψ-epistemic models predict the following:
Summary
Further experiments to test the epistemic models with a state of single particles and with fewer assumptions are needed. We report an experimental test of the existence of the continuous ψ-epistemic models with high-dimensional single photon quantum states. We produce the heralded narrowband single photon quantum states in dimensions 3, 7, 16, 25 and 32 to test the no-go theorem and our results support the no-go theorem for continuous ψ-epistemic models. The no-go theory of continuous ψ-epistemic models is tested without additional assumptions except for the fair-sampling assumption for the single photon detection loophole made in all of the above experiments[15,16,17] and often made in nonlocality experiments[18]
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