Tackling Loopholes in Experimental Tests of Bell's Inequality

Bell's inequality sets a strict threshold for how strongly correlated the outcomes of measurements on two or more particles can be, if the outcomes of each measurement are independent of actions undertaken at arbitrarily distant locations. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, predicts that measurements on particles in entangled states can be more strongly correlated than Bell's inequality would allow. Whereas experimental tests conducted over the past half-century have consistently measured violations of Bell's inequality---consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics---the experiments have been subject to one or more "loopholes," by means of which certain alternatives to quantum theory could remain consistent with the experimental results. This chapter reviews three of the most significant loopholes, often dubbed the "locality," "fair-sampling," and "freedom-of-choice" loopholes, and describes how recent experiments have addressed them.
Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures. Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Interpretations of Quantum Physics, ed. Olival Freire, Jr. (Oxford University Press, 2021)