Abstract

We address the important issue of how to unambiguously identify signatures of quantum entanglement in the presence of decoherence and loss. We analyse entanglement, EPR and Bell violation experiments, with both state impurity and detector inefficiency effects included. We also find a new class of Bell inequality, applicable to either discrete or continuous measurements. This new Bell inequality has the remarkable property that it is more immune to losses as the photon number and number of parties observing increases.

© 2008 Optical Society of America