PeterDonis said:
Ok, I took a look. Here's the problem. From the 2002 paper, p. 5:
"A seemingly paradoxical situation arises — as suggested by Peres [4] — when Alice’s Bell-state analysis is delayed long after Bob’s measurements. This seems paradoxical, because Alice’s measurement projects photons 0 and 3 into an entangled state after they have been measured. Nevertheless, quantum mechanics predicts the same correlations."
My question is:
how does QM predict the same correlations when the photons never coexist? The way I did it when I did the math using the Schrodinger equation in a previous thread, there are
no Bell states with photons 1 & 4. Ever. Anywhere. So
that analysis, while it certainly supports the claim that QM predicts the same correlations, does
not support the claim that it does so by means of Bell states with photons 1 & 4--because there are no such states anywhere in the analysis. (And you have already agreed that, if photons 1 & 4 never coexist, there is no time at which such a Bell state exists.)
The 2002 paper does not give
any mathematical analysis to back up the claim I quoted above. So I have no way of knowing
why they think that claim is true. Is it just because the experiments show the same correlations? Or is it because someone has actually done a mathematical analysis,
not the same as the one I did, that
does involve a Bell state with photons 1 & 4 even though they never coexist? I don't mean just
writing down such a Bell state; I mean showing
how such a Bell state can arise from the dynamics even though photons 1 & 4 never coexist.
The other paper, from 2012, does a very short mathematical operation to obtain such a Bell state: it takes the state in equation (2) and rearranges it, applying a time delay to photons 2 & 4 and algebraically refactoring, to obtain equation (3), which is an entangled superposition of the 4 possible "double biphoton" states for photons 1 & 4, and photons 2 & 3. Each photon 1 & 4 state in that superposition is a Bell State. (In actual experiments, as you have said, only 1 or at most 2 of these can actually be distinguished after all measurements are made. But that's not important for what we're discussing here.)
However, this still doesn't help, because in equation (2), the paper is already
assuming that it makes sense to write down a tensor product state between biphotons at different times. But this assumption is never justified by any first principles analysis. This paper appears to be depending on the other "temporal mode" paper that
@Morbert referenced, which at least tries to construct a Hilbert space for such states. But there is still no dynamics; there is nothing corresponding to the Schrodinger equation or anything like it.
Perhaps the underlying assumption here is that standard NRQM, where you use the Schrodinger equation and you have a state of the system that evolves in time, is simply inapplicable to these types of experiments. But if
that is the case, I would certainly like to see somebody justify that assumption and explain what should be put in its place.