Extreme nonlocality with one photon

Abstract

Quantum nonlocality is typically assigned to systems of two or more well-separated particles, but nonlocality can also exist in systems consisting of just a single particle when one considers the subsystems to be distant spatial field modes. Single particle nonlocality has been confirmed experimentally via a bipartite Bell inequality. In this paper, we introduce an N-party Hardy-like proof of the impossibility of local elements of reality and a Bell inequality for local realistic theories in the case of a single particle superposed symmetrically over N spatial field modes (i.e. N qubit W state). We show that, in the limit of large N, the Hardy-like proof effectively becomes an all-versus-nothing (or Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ)-like) proof, and the quantum-classical gap of the Bell inequality tends to be the same as that in a three-particle GHZ experiment. We describe how to test the nonlocality in realistic systems. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.