Decoherence-free emergence of macroscopic local realism for entangled photons in a cavity

We investigate the influence of environmental noise on polarization entangled light generated by parametric emission in a cavity. By adopting a recent separability criterion, we show that (i) self-stimulation may suppress the detrimental influence of noise on entanglement, but (ii) once it becomes effective, a noise-equipped classical model of parametric emission provides the same results of quantum theory with respect to the separability criterion. More generally we also show that, in the macroscopic limit, it is not possible to observe violations of local realism with measurements of finite order $n$-particle correlations only. These results provide a prototypical case of the emergence of macroscopic local realism in the presence of strong entanglement even in the absence of decoherence.

Figure 1

(Color online) Time development of $⟨{\mathbf{J}}^2⟩∕⟨N⟩$ according to classical (dashed line) and quantum (continuous line) mechanics, and quantum calculation of of the total mean photon number $⟨N⟩$. Parameters are given in the text.