Large violation of Bell inequalities using both particle and wave measurements

When separated measurements on entangled quantum systems are performed, the theory predicts correlations that cannot be explained by any classical mechanism: communication is excluded because the signal should travel faster than light; pre-established agreement is excluded because Bell inequalities are violated. All optical demonstrations of such violations have involved discrete degrees of freedom and are plagued by the detection-efficiency loophole. A promising alternative is to use continuous variables combined with highly efficient homodyne measurements. However, all schemes proposed so far use states or measurements that are extremely difficult to achieve, or produce very weak violations. Here we show that large violations for feasible states can be achieved if both photon counting and homodyne detections are used. Our scheme may lead to the first violation of Bell inequalities using continuous-variable measurements and pave the way for a loophole-free Bell test.