What is this thing (sometimes) called "Classical Entanglement"?

Seminars | Thursday, September 06, 2018 | 16:30:00
Speaker:
Gabriela Barreto Lemos

This funny thing (sometimes) called "Classical Entanglement". Different degrees of freedom of a classical beam of light can exhibit some features of quantum entanglement, enabling classical optical analogies to certain quantum information protocols, and allowing light beams to violate inequalities analogous to Bell, expressed in intensities rather than probabilities. Traditional explanations of this phenomenon focus on the fact that genuine quantumness also requires reduced photon number fluctuations, or that the modes be space-like separated. I will give an overview of the phenomenon and the heated debate surrounding it. Then we will analyze this phenomenon from a causal modeling perspective. Causal models have recently been used to argue that Bell inequality violations in quantum systems are a signature of `fine-tuning'. We ask whether the same conclusion also holds for Bell inequality violations of classical light. We determine that the problem is not well-posed unless one draws an explicit link between classical light intensities and probabilistic variables, but we show that any attempt to introduce such variables requires explicit fine-tuning.