A Model of Nonlocal Quantum Electrodynamics : Time's Arrow and EPR-like Quantum Correlation

Abstract

A recent experiment with squeezed light has shown that two-photon absorption by an atom can occur with a linear intensity dependence. We point out that this result verifies a prediction made by us more than a decade ago from an analysis of a nonlocal model of QED. This model had earlier been proposed by us in an ad hoc manner to interpret certain features of multiphoton double ionization and above-threshold ionization in an atom placed in a strong laser field ; in this paper we show that the model can be obtained field- theoretically by demanding covariance of the field Lagrangian under a nonlocal U(1) gauge transformation. The model also makes direct contact with squeezed light, and thus allows us to describe these two completely different scenarios from a unified point of view. We obtain a fundamentally new result from our nonlocal QED, namely that only the past, but not the future, can influence the present - thus establishing a non-thermodynamic arrow of time at the quantum level. We also show that correlations within a quantum system should necessarily be of the EPR-type, a result that agrees with Bell's theorem. These results follow from the simple requirement of energy conservation in matter-radiation interaction. Furthermore, we also predict new and experimentally verifiable results on the basis of our model QED.