Testing Bell inequalities in photonic crystals

Abstract

We show how entangled atomic pairs can be prepared in order to test the Bell inequalities. The scheme is based on the interaction of the atoms with a highly localized field mode within a photonic crystal. The potential of using optically separated transitions and the stability of the entangled state to spontaneous emission could lead to the closure of the communication and the detection loopholes appearing in experiments so far. The robustness of the scheme against detector inefficiencies, the spread in the atomic velocities and the fact that the entangled pairs are not generated simultaneously is also studied.