Evidence for Counterfactual Violation of Local Conservation Laws in Quantum Events

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09205v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:22:15 GMT
• Title: Evidence for Counterfactual Violation of Local Conservation Laws in Quantum Events
• Abstract summary: Physical conservation laws, such as those of energy and momentum, are generally believed to hold exactly and locally in spacetime.<n>An argument has been made that individual quantum events, unlike ensemble averages, may occasionally violate local conservation laws.<n>Here we provide experimental evidence for such a violation.
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• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Physical conservation laws, such as those of energy and momentum, are generally believed to hold exactly and locally in spacetime, including in quantum phenomena. Yet Aharonov, Popescu, and Rohrlich (APR) recently argued, on the basis of a thought experiment, that individual quantum events, unlike ensemble averages, may occasionally violate local conservation laws. Their argument relies on the wave phenomenon known as "superoscillations", which APR themselves discovered more than 30 years ago. Here we provide experimental evidence for such a violation. We extract photons from a small superoscillatory region near the core of an optical vortex and show that their mean transverse momentum is statistically incompatible with a general bound implied by local momentum conservation. The derivation of this bound requires only the theoretically well-supported assumption that the extraction mechanism does not alter the photons' mean transverse momentum. We also detect photons with high transverse momentum at a rate significantly exceeding that predicted by a model assuming local momentum conservation. Because this violation can be established only counterfactually and through postselection, it does not conflict with relativistic causality. Our results may represent the first example of a distinct form of quantum nonlocality that does not explicitly rely on entanglement.

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