What is entanglement?

Emilio Santos

Published 2002-04-04Version 1

I conjecture that only those states of light whose Wigner function is positive are real states, and give arguments suggesting that this is not a serious restriction. Hence it follows that the Wigner formalism in quantum optics is capable of interpretation as a classical wave field with the addition of a zeropoint contribution. Thus entanglement between pairs of photons with a common origin occurs because the two light signals have amplitudes and phases, both below and above the zeropoint intensity level, which are correlated with each other.