Entanglement in a noninteracting mesoscopic structure

We study the time-dependent electron-electron and electron-hole correlations in a mesoscopic device which is splitting an incident current of free fermions into two spatially separated particle streams. We analyze the appearance of entanglement as manifested in a Bell inequality test and discuss its origin in terms of local spin-singlet correlations already present in the initial channel and the action of post-selection during the Bell-type measurement. The time window over which the Bell inequality is violated is determined in the tunneling limit and for the general situation with arbitrary transparencies. We compare our results with alternative Bell inequality tests based on coincidence probabilities.