Experimental Tests of Multiplicative Bell Inequalities

Abstract

This thesis is the synthesis of theoretical and experimental works performed in the area of quantum foundations, particularly on quantum correlations and experimental tests of multiplicative Bell inequalities. First we begin with a comprehensive theoretical work performed on the foundations of quantum mechanics, focusing on the puzzling concepts of quantum entanglement, and hidden variable theories. Specifically, we present a broad overview of different classes of hidden variable theories such as local, crypto-nonlocal, contextual and non-local theories, along with several Bell like inequalities for these theories, providing theoretical proofs based on quantum mechanics for the falsification of some of these theories. Second we present a body of experimental, and theoretical works performed on a new class of Bell inequalities, i.e., the multiplicative Bell inequalities. We experimentally report the observation of the Bell parameters close to the Tsirelson (quantum) limit, upto a large number of measurement devices $(n)$, and compare the results with a particular deterministic strategy. We also obtain classical bounds for some $n$, and report the experimental violation of these classical limits. We theoretically derive new richer bounds on the CHSH inequality (named after John Clauser, Michael Horne, Abnor Shimony and Richard Holt) and the multiplicative Bell parameter for $n=2$, based on the principle of ``relativistic independence'', and experimentally observe the distribution of Bell parameters as predicted by these bounds.