Beyond Bell’s theorem: realism and locality without Bell-type correlations

The long-lasting view of entanglement as the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics has been recently challenged by experimental demonstrations of non-quantum entanglement. This motivates a review of the meaning of Bell violations, which have been widely taken to prove the impossibility of a realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics and as a manifestation of its non-local character. This work provides new theoretical evidence for the need of reviewing the meaning of Bell violations, especially when they occur outside the quantum framework. We present a local-realistic model that reproduces quantum predictions concerning Bell tests. We claim that local-realism is fully compatible with correlations that are not of the Bell type and therefore lie outside the scope of Bell’s theorem. Most experimental Bell tests involve either spin vectors spanning the Bloch sphere or Stokes vectors spanning the Poincaré sphere. A suitable statistical tool that allows assessing correlations between vectors is given by inner-product-type correlations. Using them, it is possible to reproduce quantum predictions for all Bell states, thereby explaining experimental results of Bell tests within a local-realistic framework.