Entanglement Swapping between Noncoexisting Photons: Falsifiable DQ-12 Interpretation

Entanglement swapping between photons that never coexist in laboratory time provides a clean test of the temporal ordering of quantum measurements without invoking retrocausal signaling. We review the 2013 Physical Review Letters experiment by Megidish et al., correcting several common secondary-source simplifications: the temporal separation was implemented with a 31.6 m free-space delay line (105 ns), the final state of photons 1 and 4 was characterized by quantum-state tomography, and the reported result was a conditional entangled state with approximately 77% fidelity to the target Bell state rather than a standalone Bell-inequality test. We then integrate this experimental basis with a DQ-12 interpretation in which photonic excitations are modeled phenomenologically as phase modes of a higher-dimensional continuous state substrate. Within that interpretation, detection is treated as a local relaxation map, while the Bell-state projection on the intermediate photons is represented as a conditional phasebridging operation. Crucially, the standard quantum-mechanical account is sufficient for the observed experiment; DQ-12 is therefore presented not as a confirmed explanation but as an additional ontology that acquires scientific content only through differential, falsifiable predictions. We propose residual observables, delay-dependent tests, matched controls, and a null hypothesis that reduce the DQ-12 claim to an experimentally decidable extension.