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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 6: History and Philosophy of Physics

AGPhil 6.5: Talk

Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 18:00–18:15, HS XVII

On the prospects of a grounding-based account of entanglement swapping — •Jørn Kløvfjell Mjelva — Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Norway

Quantum mechanics predicts that measurements on entangled systems will display correlations that defy a causal explanation in terms of a common cause, apparently indicating "spooky action-at-a-distance". Ismael and Schaffer (2020) have proposed that the modal connections between entangled systems may instead be explained by the correlated events being the results of a common ground. Rather than attributing the connection to action-at-a-distance, the common ground explanation attributes it to an ontological dependence of the parts on the entangled whole they compose. But what if the state of the whole itself depends on distant events? In particular, what if the state of a composite system could be either entangled or non-entangled depending on operations performed on a distant system? These questions become pertinent as we consider the case of entanglement swapping; a process in which entanglement is "transferred" from on pair of particles to another, without any direct interactions facilitating the transfer. In this paper, I discuss the issues entanglement swapping raises for the common ground-strategy, and present a way they may be resolved.

Keywords: Entanglement Swapping; Common Ground Explanations; Entanglement; Bell correlations