Entanglement swapping allows one to establish entanglement between independent particles that never interacted or share any common past. This feature makes it an integral constituent of quantum repeaters. Here, we demonstrate entanglement swapping with time-synchronized independent sources with a fidelity that is high enough to violate a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality by more than four standard deviations. The fact that both entangled pairs are created by fully independent only electronically connected sources ensures that this technique is suitable for future long-distance quantum communication experiments as well as for novel tests on the foundations of quantum physics.

• Received 26 September 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.79.040302