Abstract

For measurements describable by a discrete set of possibilities, numerous demonstrations of the violation of Bell's inequalities have been reported in optical physics based on observations of polarization correlations for photon pairs. By contrast for observables with a continuous spectrum, there appears to be no general inequalities corresponding to those of Bell and no experimental realization of the original Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. Following Reid and Drummond,¹ we are attempting to demonstrate the EPR paradox in the context of the measurement of continuous quantum variables with a subthreshold optical parametric oscillator operated in a frequency degenerate but polarization nondegenerate mode. In this case, the EPR paradox is formulated in terms of two sets of quadrature phase amplitudes for the spatially separated signal and idler fields. As the parametric gain is increased toward threshold, the quadrature amplitudes of the signal and idler beams become increasingly faithful quantum copies of one another. Our measurements of quadrature amplitudes are carried out using independent balanced homodyne detectors at two sites. When operated for the detection of squeezing at one site, noise reductions of 4 dB relative to the vacuum state limit are observed, which is most encouraging since noise reductions >3 dB in the difference photocurrent from the two sites are sufficient for inference at a distance of a signal observable from a measurement of the corresponding idler variable.

© 1989 Optical Society of America