Materializing the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics Instruments and the First Bell Tests

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.

Introduction.- Bell's Inequality Experiments.- Sources of Entangled Photons.- Analyzers.- Detection Sets.- Twinning the Threads.- Conclusions.

Climério Silva Neto is an assistant professor of physics and history of science at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics (2009) and master’s (2011) and doctoral (2015) degrees in history and philosophy of science and science teaching from UFBA. His Ph.D. dissertation on the making of the Soviet laser physics won the prize for best dissertation in history of science awarded by the Brazilian Society of History of Science and Technology. His training/research experience includes one academic year as a visiting graduate student at the University of British Columbia and shorter research stays at the American Institute of Physics, the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Centre for History of Sciences of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His current research focuses on the history of physics in the 20th century from the perspective of instrumentation and transnational collaboration/competition. The present manuscript stemmed from a handbook chapter for The Oxford Handbook of the History of Quantum Interpretations (March 2022) on the instrumentation of experiments in the foundations of quantum mechanics.