Cluster property and Bell inequalities

Among the many loopholes that might be invoked to reconcile local realism with the experimental violations of Bell inequalities, the space dependence of the correlation functions appears particularly relevant for its connections with the so-called cluster property, one of the basic ingredients of axiomatic quantum field theory. The property states that the expectation values of products of observables supported within spacelike separated space-time regions factorize. Actually, in some massive models the factorization is exponentially fast with respect to the distance between the systems possibly involved in actual experiments. It is then often argued that considering the space dependence of the quantities involved in the Bell-like inequalities would eventually not violate them and thus support the reproducibility of the quantum behavior by a suitable local hidden variable model. In this paper, we show when this is actually the case and how nonlocal effects can still be visible.