THE EINSTEIN-PODOLSKY-ROSEN DEBATE - ON THE WAY TO A FINAL ANSWER

The status of our experimental realization of Bohm's spin-1/2 particle version of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen gedankenexperiment is discusse d. This new experiment provides a definitive test of the, as yet, unte sted strong Bell inequalities. It closes the two widely recognized loo pholes associated with previous experiments, and has the interesting n ew feature that the entangled state exists for milliseconds rather tha n nanoseconds. The spin one-half particles are two Hg-199 atoms in an entangled nuclear spin state with total nuclear spin zero. Measurement of the nuclear spin correlation is achieved by detection of each atom using a spin state selective two photon excitation-ionization scheme.