Materializing the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: Instruments and the First Bell Tests (SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology)

This book offers a history of the instrumentation used to materialize the early thought experiments devised in the Einstein-Bohr disputes over the foundations of quantum mechanics. It shows how the second world war and cold war fostered the development of materials, instruments, and systems that made it possible to create, manipulate, and detect single quantum systems, thus creating the material conditions for experiments in foundations of quantum mechanics and for a broad spectrum of experimental inquiries on the structure and properties of matter which underlay the creation of new research fields such as quantum optics, quantum information, and atomic, molecular, and optical physics. Discussing research and development performed in diverse contexts, this book reveals how physicists carried instruments, and the knowledge they embodied, through disciplinary and geographic frontiers to probe entanglement, a most intriguing feature of the quantum world. Acknowledgments 7 Contents 9 1 Introduction 10 2 Bell’s Inequalities Experiments 16 3 Sources of Entangled Photons 20 3.1 Positron Annihilation 21 3.2 Photon Cascade 25 3.3 Spontaneous Parametric Down Conversion 37 4 Analyzers 43 4.1 Analyzers for γ-Rays 43 4.2 Analyzers for Low-Energy Photons 45 5 Detection Sets 52 5.1 Photomultiplier Tubes 53 5.2 Scintillation Counters and Coincidence Circuits 58 5.3 Counting Photons 62 6 Twining the Threads 71 7 Conclusions 76